Paul Crider

@paulcrider

Liberal in the Smith-Douglass-Mill-Anderson vein. Writer and editor for Liberal Currents.

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Paul Crider@paulcrider· 26d

Checking in on Tyler Cowen, board member for the Institute for Humane Studies, Director for Emergent Ventures, member of the illustrious Mont Pelerin Society, and admirer of virgin actresses. "Billionaire derangement syndrome is now a thing."

Selection from the Marginal Revolution blog, titled "Andrew Hall is on a roll"

He is one of the new(ish) thinkers on the rise, here is his latest piece. Excerpt:

For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones.

Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.

Yes, billionaire derangement syndrome is now a thing. As a side note, I was told that Andrew is the son of the great economist Robert E. Hall of Stanford.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· 27d

Apparently one of the most respected pollsters in Michigan!

Paul Crider@paulcrider· 27d

I was very interested to see Edmund Fawcett sounding notes very similar to mine on the current state of liberalism and how DSA relates to said liberalism. In short: DSA is not fundamentally illiberal, they may nudge the Democratic Party leftward, and that would be a welcome thing.

In a wide-ranging response to my questions, Edmund Fawcett, the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” argued that
liberals could recover if they became, as once, inclusive, democratic. If, that is, they made their promises for everyone, not just a few. They’d also need to relearn how to talk of their principles as if they mattered and we should care about them.
That brings in D.S.A. Name aside, they’re what for years we called progressives or social democrats. They want liberal promises for everyone. They want revenue or debt to spend on improving well-being and public services. To a left liberal (e.g., me), that’s appealing.
The liberal centrism of Zakaria and Wooldridge, Fawcett wrote,
feels ambiguous to me. Is it a meritocratic fight against cosseted advantage? Or a democratic fight to extend fairer shares to all?
It sounds more the first. In which case, yes, it does leave ground to the left for D.S.A. to win.
The D.S.A., Fawcett added, “might replace the Democratic Party (unlikely given first-past-the-post, bane of insurgents). Or its zeal and confidence might nudge Democrats leftward. I’d like to see that, but I’m not betting my pension on it.”

Paul Crider@paulcrider· 28d

Indeed.

Text discussing Pope Leo calling on the US to welcome immigrants with "compassion and generosity."

Paul Crider@paulcrider· 29d

Interesting broadening of perspective of the Milwaukee sewer socialists. One thing I didn't know before is that Frank Zeidler identified as a liberal.

By the time Zeidler was elected to his first term as mayor in 1948, the Socialist Party’s influence in Milwaukee was barely an echo of what it had been in the time of Seidel or the early decades of Hoan’s mayoral administration. As historian Tula A. Connell has pointed out, the organization that laid the foundation for Zeidler’s first election was not the Socialist Party but the Municipal Enterprise Committee (later the Public Enterprise Committee), a grassroots coalition of activists who were united not by party membership but by common aspirations. Zeidler continued to be active as a leader in party affairs at both the local and national levels. But in his role as a mayor, he identified as a liberal—a term that, in his usage, included democratic socialists and like-minded people of any party affiliation. Party discipline was an important element of Socialist success in the early twentieth century, when the famed “bundle brigade” canvassed for votes in working-class neighborhoods. But as historian S. Ani Mukherji has pointed out, efforts to maintain discipline were less effective in the Popular Front era.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 12

Here is some straight up misogyny in my replies.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 10

I will always be a Harris skeptic. But the fact that *she* is talking about expanding the Supreme Court and adding DC and PR states is immensely encouraging. These ideas are solidly mainstream now. Note that Buttigieg has made similar comments.

I’ll put it plainly: Democrats need to grow a backbone, and we cannot be afraid to have a conversation about systemic reforms to restore voting rights.

I have been saying that it is time for a no-bad-ideas brainstorm. Because the threats to voting rights are structural, our solutions must be as well. Here are some of the things that must be on the table to ensure power stays with the people:

Expanding the Supreme Court beyond its 9 members

Reforming or eliminating the Electoral College

Using the tools available to the Senate Judiciary Committee to implement real consequences for judicial nominees who lie

Enforceable ethics reform for the members of the Supreme Court

Enacting statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 9

9. Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821 - 1853, by Charles Hale. Part of an ongoing effort of mine to learn more about Latin American liberalism. Mora himself I'm pretty unenthusiastic about. His anti-clericalism is interesting, and the fact that he was most influenced by Constant.

Book cover for Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821 - 1853, by Charles A. Hale. Brown book with red fleur de lis designs.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 7

I am for this kind of thing.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 7

In other news, I am here for Star Wars' upcoming Femdom era.

Social media pic blurb with two female Star Wars actors (Rosario Dawson and Daisy Ridley, but neither dressed as their respective Star Wars roles). It reads:
BREAKING NEWS
LUCASFILM'S UPCOMING
STAR WARS PROJECTS
WILL BE DOMINATED BY
FEMALE LEADS

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 2

Who wrote it? Sounds like some shitlib from @liberalcurrents.com.

The DSA of today reflects this internally, even if many of its members don’t explicitly acknowledge it. Ideologically it represents a fusion of socialist and liberal ideas: the belief in the permanence of politics, not a pursuit of its abolition; the belief in pluralism as a good in itself; the recognition that no revolution abolishes disagreement and the need for civil mediation of differences.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Vivek Chibber is a command and control leftist. This is what that looks like when applied to immigration. There is some number (and kind!) of immigrants we can absorb economically and politically so they're not scavenging for food on the street like rats.

That’s why I come back to my point, which is that our proposed principle has to be to allow the number of people in that you can successfully absorb. And that absorption means political absorption, so that there isn’t a backlash, as well as material absorption, so that they aren’t out on the street all the time looking for scraps, and they can be gainfully employed and given the social services that they deserve. And over time, I think you’ll have a much more stable, and probably much more generous immigration regime this way.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Okay but see, this is dumb. How do you think the left can depoliticize immigration when the right always already has politicized it, Lee? The problem is the right is more passionate in their hatred for immigrants than the left (or the center) is passionate in embracing immigrants.

And then I think that we need to actually depoliticize immigration, because it’s not really the thing that causes all of these other problems that make people want to vote for Trump, right? People voted for Trump because he promised them all sorts of economic goods, right? That the world was going to be better. And people are turning on him now because he hasn’t delivered on those things. And in the context of that, he used immigration as a scapegoat to say, “This is the reason why you can’t have all these nice things, and I’m going to deport all these people and then things will be great.”

And so what immigration has been useful for politically is as this sort of political cudgel. And when we engage in that game, the Left will always lose because of nationalism, and because things really do suck. And if you’re talking about immigration, it’s easy to point at immigrants and scapegoat them, right?

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Suzy Lee says some dumb things about the Biden administration in this discussion, but I think her heart is in the right place. She wrote a case for open borders several years ago that I thought was pretty good. The left has to change minds and not buy into rightwing or Chibber framing.

I think the other part, this thing that you said about nationalism, is something I’m thinking about a lot and trying to understand. I think that you may be right, but also that it’s the responsibility of the Left to change it. And not in terms of yelling at people and saying “You’re racist” and that kind of thing, but it makes me think about the Mamdani campaign.

I think it was effective in the sense that it didn’t say migration is a problem, even though all those people were bused into the city and exacerbated housing problems, right? He didn’t say it was a problem. He was like, “Immigration is great. I support immigrants. Immigrants have rights,” all that stuff. But the core of the campaign was about material issues, something else, right? And I think that the Left out of power should focus on immigrants’ rights.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Ah, well. There it is.

Vivek Chibber
It seems to me a pretty clear-cut principle, which is you should allow only as many immigrants in as your infrastructure and your political culture can absorb. Now, that’s not giving any numbers. That’s not giving any clear laws, but it’s a principle. So in certain countries, that’ll mean a fairly restrictive immigration policy.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Vivek Chibber wants to take *this* moment—a moment when people are seeing the horrors of mass deportation and Abolishing ICE is more popular than ever—to douse the flames of pro-immigrant sentiment. No, no, says Chibber, the Volk still want deportation.

All that said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the basic support for deportation remains in place. What people are objecting to is the brutality of it and the militarization of it, and they don’t like these federal troops coming into their cities and overturning the local cops, and overturning the local machine of law and order. But it would be a mistake to think that there is now a movement against the deportation regime per se. It’s important for the Left to recognize this: Across all the different sectors of the population, the basic idea that if people are here illegally, if they’re here clandestinely, then they shouldn’t be allowed to stay, or that there has to be some kind of tightening of the sluices through which they’re coming in. I think that still remains in place.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Ah yes, because Biden and Harris never talked about immigration.

Vivek Chibber
This was the context in which you see Trump running for his second presidency. There was a palpable sense of a national immigration crisis. And it was obviously not concocted out of thin air. Biden and Kamala Harris refused to deal with it or acknowledge it. And Trump made tremendous political capital out of this.

If you compare his two presidential campaigns, in the first one, he’s running as much more of a populist and outsider, wanting to shake the halls of power. And in the second one, the populism is basically gone. And it’s full-frontal anti-immigration and incredibly racist. And then, of course, the issue of the wars, of wanting to end the forever wars. But he comes into office essentially on an anti-immigrant platform. And that is largely because of the way in which, as Suzy is saying, Biden handled immigration during his presidency.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jul 1

Huh? Because when I think of the Biden administration, I definitely think "open borders."

Suzy Lee
Well, I think the first thing is that the Biden administration intensified the crisis through the way that it highlighted migration. I think they made political hay out of undoing the Trump era migration policies, which were very unpopular. But in so doing and making immigration this big-ticket item, it means that it told the rest of the world, “We’re opening our borders. You’re welcome to come.”

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 29

Image of Jonathan Haidt next to a slide titled "Both Sides Deny 'Inconvenient Truths'"

Left:
IQ deniers, Heritability deniers, Sex difference deniers, Evolution deniers, Stereotype accuracy deniers

Right:
Young-earthers, Evolution deniers, War crimes deniers, climate change deniers

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

Real centrism has never been tr--hold on, I'm receiving some new information.

Political quiz with all four sliders at 50/50. Resule is Georgia Meloni.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

lol britmonkey.com/2020s-politi...

Political quiz result showing closest match is Zohran Mamdani.
77% Woke
50/50 Techbro Neo-Luddite
52% Hopepilled
91% Davos

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

Except for high treason!

Poll question: I support the death penalty.

Response: Strongly disagree.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

Real cause of crime is elite impunity.

Poll question: The primary cause of crime is poverty and deprivation.

Response: Disagree

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

I don't actually know what an "alternative girl" is? Like is that a thing? So I'm just assuming here.

Poll question: I think 'alternative' girls are ...

Response: Sexy.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

Obligatory.

Poll question: How many genders are there?

Response: At least three. Don't play games with me, kid.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 26

Interesting shift in my opinion here. Even a year ago I would have Strongly Agreed, but I think the economics have simply changed with solar and storage so that there is less room for nuclear in the energy mix.

Poll question: I support building more nuclear energy plants.

Response is Agree.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 25

Use your Wordle guesses in a sentence challenge. "Take the reins! Later, power queer!" Happy Pride!

Wordle with four guesses: reins, later, power, queer (which was the answer).

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 22

Pouring one out for Alan Greenspan today. I think he grew a lot after his youthful engagement with Ayn Rand. In the end he cemented the image of Fed Chair qua sober, independent technocrat.

Black and white picture of Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand in the White House with Gerald and Mrs Ford. Not sure who the guy on the right is.

Paul Crider@paulcrider· Jun 20

This may not be forever. If the illiberal currents among the Democratic Socialists of America gain greater influence, then they will lose their usefulness and liberal goodwill.