Yeah.... contra how you are interpreting that... The fact that "conservative"
has an increasingly splintered definition, as you demonstrated, actually evidences how
problematic it is that the intellectual conservatives have, for several decades now, been
systematically excluded from their natural place in the society... that is /exactly /the
type of problem they would help with 🤷
Best,
Eric
<mailto:[email protected]>
On Thu, Sep 3, 2026 at 5:50 PM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
EricS' response to EricC's over-reliance on the meaning of "conservative"
was better than anything I could have said. But the 6 proposed definitions were too long
for my tiny context window. So I asked Ellydee to shorten them for me. (I also asked
Mistral. But she did a terrible job.) I think these are pretty good:
Ellydee.ai says ---
**1. Power Hoarding** — Argument-form masking the real motive of those who
already hold power to keep and concentrate it, widening the gap over those who
don't.
**2. Prudent Restraint** — The view that change for change's sake is too harmful to
go unregulated; "move fast and break things" is not an admirable values system.
**3. Institutional Gatekeeping** — Fragile categories like "family" survive
only if their defining form is rigidly held, so alternative forms must be presumptively
excluded from law and civil rights.
**4. Doctrinal Veto** — The devout get authority over who else qualifies for the
group — leaving open whether mystics, or fakers under the "faith" label, are in
or out.
**5. Rooted Locality** — Anyone not living their whole life in one place
can't be trusted to defend it; local tribal obligation is the oldest form of
mutual accountability.
**6. Generational Accounting** — A negotiation (doable in good or bad
faith) over how much of the past must be kept current as a debt versus let go
once enough generations have passed.
---
I was inclined to change "Rooted Locality" to "Rooted Subjectivity" or "Perspective"
... in a lame attempt to tie in the other sub-thread. But I didn't feel like this task was worth the cost. They have a
handy ellydee.ai/usage <http://ellydee.ai/usage> page for those of us who give a damn. >8^D
On 9/2/26 2:04 PM, Santafe wrote:
> At a kind of vibe level, I understand the picture you paint, and I can
think of enough instances that fit it, to agree that there is a problem to correct.
>
> But how far can you go to defend the premise that the retirement of some
academics was a HUGE problem in this country — or more specifically, do you think
that is causal for the choice of what has become the political right to go in for
fascism, with its considerable elements of cynicism, anomie, and nihilism? Had
there been “ideas” on offer from some university faculty, do you think these
people would have wanted them? Or just wanted to burn that down too along with
all the rest of it?
>
> As with many things I can kind of recognize at a vibe level, if I look
at it more closely, I don’t know what I should understand the categories even to
refer to. By which I mean, what should I attach to the word “conservatism”, as
any range of things from a movement name, to a social group-label, to a domain or
thesis of “ideas”. For instance, is it:
>
> 1. A backfilling of what is meant to look like argument, but anchored
for real in the motive of holding onto power, wealth, and agency by those who have
it, and further concentrating it, specifically to increase the asymmetry over
those who don't? Certainly that goes on, and those who want to fight the C label
as a label would say this is its essence. Is that its essence, or is that the
essence of a corruption when the real C word has been lost? If it is part of the
genuine thing, how far does it go toward efforts to cultivate the belief that
people are constitutively different enough that there is no defensible right of
agency and freedom for everybody on an equal footing, and there should be rulers
and ruled?
>
> 2. A thesis that “move fast and break things” was not an admirable
values system, and that seeking change merely for change’s sake is too harmful
relative to what it achieves to be allowed to go on un-regulated or un-restricted?
That would fit with the name C. Wendell Berry died a couple of days ago,
somebody I knew a little and had some time with in person, and have also read some
of though not nearly a lot. This was one of his theses. Close to the notion of
upholding the Ordnung among the Amish, or a defense of Luddism as honorable
precaution.
>
> 3. A notion that a category like “family” is robust only through
cultural collective and cooperative effects, and that a type system needs to be
built up, and most types excluded from participation in it, because otherwise it
is so fragile that the admission of more than one form endangers it? So, for
instance: we have no real way to distinguish abusive from supportive marriages, so
as long as there is one man and one woman, so-identified by self and others (maybe
a subset of who the others are allowed to be), we have to admit it all. But other
kinds of unions need to be kept outside the perimeter as viewed by the protections
of law and the rights of civil society? The argument being (?) that there are
certain obligations the institution needs to enable people to keep (raising and
support of kids being the obvious one, but you can imagine others, and I know of
marriage customs that symbolically encode several different ones), and we know so
little about how to do that,
> that some one form accepted at whatever level of consideration
constitutes social convention is the only conceivable solution, so anything else
needs to be presumptively excluded.
>
> 4. That people have to experience religious devotions, of whatever kind?
The word “faith” has become very popular by people trying not to alienate any of
those who go through life with a chip on their shoulders, the new PC (really the
same old PC). If people just used it, it wouldn’t be such a sore thumb to me, but
the pandering feels really blatant. Does that self-identified group, and any
Greeks using it as a Trojan Horse for whatever else motivates them — since it is
not clear how any “sincerely” motivated people police their own and keep the
fakers out — get veto power? Are the mystics excluded, as the doctrinal religious
people have often wanted them to be? Or are they religious enough that they are
okay too?
>
> 5. That anybody who doesn’t live an entire life in the place he was born
is automatically suspect? The view being that he hasn’t tied himself into any one
local lifeboat, ergo there can’t be any way he can be counted on to defend it
existentially? This is also close to one of Wendell’s views, though in person it
was important enough for him to like people, that he didn’t go into his personal
relations plastering doctrines of Original Sin on anybody to whom they could be
applied. But as a core of ethnic tribalism, this impulse to reinforce mutual
obligation seems to me to be one of the oldest and most universal cultural things
people do, and if it is ever temporarily absent in some pocket, some of the people
there will recreate it from whole cloth.
>
> 6. Is it a negotiation of how much of the completed past needs to be
kept current as a debt, and how much needs to be let go? Meaning: when, by making
extra effort to identify and support people who are on the wrong end of a
structural exclusion or exploitation, are we actively working to dismantle the
structure, and when have enough generations gone by and enough circumstances
created new people, that there isn’t anything productive to be done by trying to
trace an indefinitely long past of who-displaced-whom? I am emphasizing here, as
possible C, the premise that there is a negotiation on that point to be carried
out, as opposed to a dogma that to ever let go of anything is a sin. And if that
is the C premise, is there a distinction that is also C between having that
negotiation in good faith and having it in bad faith? Of how one tries to police
against plain irresponsible self-interest hijacking the form with no moral or
ethical anchor?
>
>
> I can imagine any of the above, or none of them, as being what
“conservatism” is supposed to stand for. And I can imagine many combinations of
people proudly advocating any of them at the same time as others would sharply
distinguish what is okay and what is corrupt or degenerated.
>
> There’s another mid-length rant about how I watch the memes change, on
timescales of about 1–4 years, and while each of them has some truth, I feel like
they are substitutes for seeing a kind of paralysis and inability or unwillingness
to actually do things that need to be done, across the whole of society, that
feels to me like a better candidate for cause of the fascist and nihilist turn.
But this note is too long already, and I should do work.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>> On Sep 3, 2026, at 2:04, Eric Charles <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> I know I'm coming to it late, but I did not find that article very
convincing. The main problems are:
>>
>> 1. Nothing about the omnipresent DEI initiatives of the past few decades assures
viewpoint diversity, and, if you are only getting people deeply devoted to DEI you are for sure
actually quashing viewpoint diversity. And, by deeply-devoted I mean that academic job
applications require DEI statements, teaching statements are required to highlight how your
teaching relates to DEI efforts, applicants are judged based on "diversity" goals at
the college and within departments, some members of hiring committees explicitly see it as
their goal to right past wrongs against certain groups with their selections, etc.
>> 2. In certain contexts there is very, very good justification to prefer a narrow
range of viewpoint diversity over maximal diversity. For example, having a math department with
different perspectives on what math "is" creates a positive environment for students
to learn in. For example, it might be nice to have a math realist, someone with an aesthetic
approach, a hard core logician-mathematician, etc., and you certainly want people who study
different fields within math. However, you might not want someone who thinks mathematics is a
tool of colonialist oppression which should be rejected from the curriculum. In fact, it might
be problematic to have proponents of that argument in decision-making roles /anywhere /within
an /educational /institution.
>> 3. I have seen (when I was full-time in academia), and continue to see (via
colleagues in academia) actual discrimination against academics with conservative views, and a
ton of self-silencing based on anticipated discrimination. To use the DEI phrase, most faculty
settings are not a "safe space" for them.
>> 4. Most of what the author asserts to be secretly implied or covertly
assumed or bad faith about the efforts seems very upfront and straightforward.
>> 5. Frankly, the failure to replace conservative academics as they retire has
created HUGE problems in this country. The conservative movement used to have decent group of
hard-core academics and public intellectuals as a key part of it. The current trainwreck of
ideas that pass for "conservative" these days could be, and could have been, greatly
helped if academia broadly returned a good chunk of the prior support it used to give to people
doing serious intellectual work from a conservative perspective.
>> 6. While this obviously applies to humanities and social sciences, it applies in
all fields. It is good for a chemistry department to have some people who believe in hard core
merit and some who believe in actively supporting those who might have had less opportunity
growing up. It is good for a chemistry department to have some people who see "less
opportunity" in terms of structural oppression rampant within a society and others who see
it in terms of individual hardship. etc.
>>
>> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>> All that said, for sure the Trump administration is acting in bad faith
in many ways, about all things... but that's a different issue.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 8:57 PM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>>
wrote:
>>
>> Agree Siraganian is wrong.
>>
>> I believe the etymology of the expression “red herring” was not
intended to be a compliment to the dogs that run off following it.
>>
>> In some lecture or interview or someplace, I remember Snyder making
a connection that seems good for the current situation: Authoritarian gaslighting
really works by adopting the main premises of postmodernism (as it has become in its
now-degenerated form; I understand the defense of some of the original work). A
thing Snyder didn’t say, which just calls out a further point of context, but that I
think is also within the center of his point: in eras where postmodernism hadn’t
spread as widely as it has here and now, the need was the same, but the authoritarian
gaslighters had to build some of the infrastructure they wanted to use. For today,
it is just there at the Ikea where you can go pick it up and assemble it the same
day. Or, so widely distributed in Amazon warehouses that they can deliver it the
same day, anywhere.
>>
>> Another nice little frame I saw, from some commenter on some
article, was:
>>
>> For my friends, the Unitary Executive Theory.
>> For my enemies, the Major Questions Doctrine.
>>
>> And then:I have heard (reasonable) people criticize Paul Krugman
for having lots of public opinions in areas where he doesn’t have a lot of earned
expertise. Okay; fair enough for that. But I think it is to his credit that he
started calling out bad faith as the central issue, quite a long time ago (when I
also thought that needed to stay the focus). Not leaving it to irony, as Siraganian
sort-of does, but being plain that it is too frontal an attack to be winked at in
irony.
>>
>> (And of course Glen’s point is also exactly right, but already
said: it is just because the notion of what one wants from truth isn’t so easy that
it can be handled lazily, and if we did less of that, maybe we would be better
positioned to repel some of this other nonsense, or at least have a smaller
vandal-group to repel over it. That could itself be an interesting article, but it
would have a completely different aim (solving a new problem) than Siraganian’s
evident aim in this piece, which was to contribute to a struggle.)
>>
>> I noticed, somewhere else, too, that Anne Applebaum has now started
to use the term “predators” explicitly to refer to the various oligarchs and the
relatively small and connected band of people trying to end the society and turn it
into a CAFO. It has been about time for that term to be one of the standards for a
while too. Not just in the generic term “predatory capitalism”, which is also
correct in some ways but has been both long-enough used, and rhetorically over-used
enough, to have become semantically bleached. Applebaum’s use is more specific and
meant to draw a role distinction in a place and a time. The predator group are the
thing that will still be here when trump is gone, and that is what the world both
knows and needs to come up with some plan to deal with, if there is a path to be
found through this that isn’t pretty miserable.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Sep 1, 2026, at 20:56, glen <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-
diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1>>
>> >
>> > OK. I admit I've been a bit guilty in my emphasis on diversity. But I am aware of
Goodhart's Law. And given thesis 2, here, I think I'm going to stop calling myself a "methodological
pluralist" and use "instrumental pluralist" instead.
>> >
>> > But 1) what Siraganian says here is simply wrong:
>> >
>> > "To promote viewpoint diversity is to be thrilled to have my views in
the mix, even if you think they are wrong, because either (a) they contribute to more viewpoint
diversity (the more views you have, the more viewpoint diversity there is), or (b) they provide
more views to choose from to figure out which view is the most true. In the first position, you
end up not caring about whether a particular view is true or good, because you care about
viewpoint diversity intrinsically: What matters is having the greatest possible variety of views.
In the second position, you instrumentally value a diversity of views; having viewpoint diversity
only matters until you can figure out which view is the best or most true, at which point all the
other views can be rejected."
>> >
>> > If the "best" or "most true" is relatively smooth from the 1st best to the 2nd best, 3rd best,
etc., then NO, you do not reject "all the others". Such smooth grading has to remain contingent, defeasible. And my guess is the
gradation isn't smooth everywhere. It may be smooth for the first 2 or 3 distinguishable ideas, but #4 might be batsh¡t. (cf.
SynthID<https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263> <https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263>>>)
>> >
>> > 2) Diversity remains a useful measure of the crosstrophic nature
of complex systems, circularity, industrial symbiosis, etc. So even in light of
Goodhart's Law, diversity is a reasonable *outcome*, even if it's dangerous to optimize
to that sole outcome.
>> >
>> > There are issues with all the theses she lays out. But persnickety nits
aside, her gist seems right. And you can't overlook the blatant hypocrisy of objecting to DEI
initiatives, but then arguing for "intellectual pluralism", pointed out in thesis 7.
>> >
>> > This post is too long already. But I know many, here, have succumbed to Haidt glazing. So I offer
this as further demonstration of Bad Faith rhetoric:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1>>
only peripherally about instrumental pluralism.
>> >
