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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
Hosted by Richard Hanania · EN
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science
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Thoughts on Trump Ending Affirmative Action in Contracting
Jan 22, 2025Tap to summarizeI’ve recently done a few appearances on Destiny’s livestream where he interrogated me on voting Republican. Honestly, when supporting a party is only a 60/40 decision for you, it’s hard to debate someone who is completely convinced in the other direction. When I wrote about why I was voting for Trump before the election, I had to tell the truth about the things that make me uncomfortable about the conservative movement, and its leader in particular.But yesterday I realized that there’s an obvious answer to the question of why I should be a Republican. They’re the only ones who might listen to me! My vote is insignificant, and won’t determine an election. The only way I can hope to have influence is through my ideas. So I could start identifying with the left today and encourage everyone to vote Democrat, and my influence over policy will slide towards zero. If Destiny thinks I have sensible ideas, he himself should want me to be in a position to make a difference. All of that was made clear to me when Trump last night repealed and replaced Executive Order 11246. This is a big deal. I wrote about how this little known EO changed American society in The Origins of Woke: While Johnson originally signed EO 11246, it was the Nixon administration that ironically created the affirmative action regime we see today, over the resistance of a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Under the Labor Department, the administration began by forcing affirmative action on construction workers, first in Philadelphia, and then nationwide. This was followed up in 1971 by Revised Order No. 4, which expanded the regulations beyond the construction industry to all contractors and subcontractors doing business with the government beyond a minimum threshold, forcing them to adopt goals and timetables whenever women or minorities were shown to be “underutilized” relative to the relevant labor pool...Nonetheless, while its legal basis is murky, there is much less doubt about the reach of EO 11246 and its successor documents. Because of the extent to which government spends money and involves itself in the economy, its ability to regulate contractors has always been a major source of leverage. Employers required to have an affirmative action program must include all of their facilities, employees, and operations in the plan, even if the government contracts in question represent only a small portion of their business. Moreover, the biggest employers in the private sector are more likely than most other businesses to have federal contracts; about a third of Fortune 500 companies did so in 2015. Today, about a quarter of the American workforce is employed by a government contractor. It is important to note that, pursuant to EO 11478 of 1969, affirmative action also exists within the federal government itself, which employs another 2 percent of the workforce.Under affirmative action guidelines as applied to government contractors, it is no exaggeration to say that businesses are forced to be obsessed with race and sex. Long before people noticed that identity-related issues had consumed American universities, something resembling modern wokeness had already been forced on big business. Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business. Government regulations specify that a “central premise underlying affirmative action is that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce, generally, will reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” If a contractor falls short in any particular area, it must take “practical steps” to make up for its deficiency.One of the most sinister aspects of all this is that it forced managers at businesses who might want nothing to do with leftist ideas to become foot soldiers in the project of identity-based governance. The employer is required to participate in a detailed process of identity-based classification and analysis. Middle managers for construction companies and retail store owners become social scientists. First, employers are forced to create an “organizational profile,” defined as “a detailed graphical or tabular chart, text, spreadsheet or similar presentation of the contractor’s organizational structure.” The contractor must break his business down into “organizational units,” and record the race, gender, and ethnicity of the supervisor of each one. Within each unit, the business must record the number of males and females of each of the following groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions. The next step is engaging in a “workforce analysis,” which divides the employees of a company by job title. Those with titles that are similar in terms of work and pay are combined into “job groups.”This initial work is required to get to the “job group analysis.” This means comparing the number of women and minorities in each job group to their estimated availability in the population. And how does one determine availability? By coming up with a number for the “percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the reasonable recruitment area.” When a particular demographic is underrepresented in a job group, the employer must create “placement goals” to correct its deficiency…Every aspect of employers’ analysis is reviewable by government bureaucrats. For the same reason that a contractor can always get around affirmative action requirements, the government can always find grounds to apply pressure on a business. From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble.In my chapter on policy suggestions, I wrote that repealing EO 11246 was low-hanging fruit, but a more aggressive approach would involve banning government contractors from engaging in DEI policies. I promoted my ideas to conservatives, including on Vivek’s podcast in early 2023, not long after telling him about EO 11246 for the first time. As Vox noted, he soon started promising to repeal the order on his first day in office if elected. Here’s a clip of me suggesting to him that a Republican president go further than that and use a new EO to ban DEI among contractors. With Trump, it took two days. But we’ve gotten to the same place. Yesterday, the president signed a new executive order with the title “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 3 repeals Executive Order 11246, giving contractors only 90 days before they must stop acting in accordance with previous rules. It then lays out new requirements.(ii) The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease: (A) Promoting “diversity”; (B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and (C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.As I suggested Trump do, it then goes on to mandate color blindness. (iii) In accordance with Executive Order 13279 of December 12, 2002 (Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations), the employment, procurement, and contracting practices of Federal contractors and subcontractors shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws. (iv) The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award: (A) A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and (B) A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall:(i) Review and revi...
Transcribe →The Ultimate Guide to Trump's Day 1 Executive Orders
Jan 21, 2025Tap to summarizeWelcome to the first full day of the second Trump administration. The White House website, at the time of this writing, lists 48 items under “presidential actions.” Among these are dozens of first day executive orders. News reports say that Trump was planning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the executive orders released so far do, broken down by topic. I then go on to take a big picture perspective regarding what we have seen so far means for the future of the country and what we can expect from the Trump administration going forward. War on NEPAThe most promising thing to happen on the American left over the last few years has been the emergence of the “abundance agenda,” which is going to be the subject of a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson coming out in March. Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres recently declared himself a convert to the cause in a podcast with Matt Yglesias. The idea is basically that there are too many government regulations that make it too difficult to build things society needs, with a particular focus on energy and housing. Now, you might be saying to yourself, we already have a political faction that thinks there are too many government regulations that restrict supply, and they’re called Republicans. On the right, you don’t even need a movement to make this case, as it is already baked into conservatives’ underlying model of how the world works. That being said, I’m glad someone is pushing the same ideas on the left, and that’s fine if they promote desirable policies even while they can’t identify with the right due to it being full of morons, conspiracy theorists, and bigots.On this point, Trump just signed an executive order called “Unleashing American Energy”. The document instructs heads of agencies to review all existing regulations and policies “that impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources — with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.”There are few things that abundance agenda types hate more than National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review, which requires mountains of paperwork and years of litigation before federal and federally-funded projects can be built if they are expected to substantially impact the environment. Here’s an article on just how bad things have gotten. Groups file lawsuits demanding more paperwork, even though they have no interest in what the resulting reports actually show. The entire point is delay and making building things more difficult and expensive. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was created to oversee NEPA and ensure agency compliance, coordinating efforts across the federal government. Section 5 of Trump’s main energy EO is called “Unleashing Energy Dominance,” in which the president instructs the CEQ to focus on revising NEPA regulations to expedite the permitting process. Agencies must emphasize speed and certainty in permitting over other considerations. They are also directed to limit environmental considerations to legislated requirements, removing additional elements that introduce delays. This is important, as most laws that get out of hand do not actually require all that much in the underlying legislation. Rather, their mandates end up expanding through actions taken by courts and the executive branch. The new executive order has the potential to scale back environmental review by narrowing the scope of impact assessments and accelerating timelines for project approvals. As mentioned, NEPA review applies to all projects either undertaken by the federal government or funded by it. Although the EO is about energy, the change put forward here is much broader than that. For example, schools receive federal funding, so they are covered by NEPA. It is actually an open question whether the decisions of the CEQ are binding on government agencies. Late last year, the DC Circuit decided that they were not. At the time, this was seen as a victory against NEPA, because the CEQ wanted higher standards of review than the agency in question. However, leftist judges could potentially now use such a decision to stand in the way of the Trump administration restricting and streamlining NEPA review across the federal government. Regardless of how this all plays out, the administration at least recognizes environmental review regulations are too stringent, and with many on the left coming to the same conclusion, I think it’s likely that NEPA does a lot less damage going forward. Trump has also made it national policyto safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation with...
Transcribe →Inauguration Day Stream
Jan 20, 2025Tap to summarizeI just did a stream on the inauguration and Trump’s potential executive orders, some of which might be signed by the time you watch this. I did this stream with screensharing, so you can follow along as I scroll X, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and read about the Biden pardons, what Trump is expected to do on his first day, and more. In the midst of the Twitter scrolling, I also go on tangents about parenting, Barron’s potential, and the Elon “Roman Salute” scandal that just happened. I find this kind of stream fun and might do it more often if people want it. The recording is available audio only as a normal podcast, but you probably won’t get nearly as much out of it if you don’t see the video. I also noticed that you might need to do full screen in order to see things well enough on a computer. I think that it might actually work better on mobile. Sorry, the Substack video feature is still a work in progress. Read more
Transcribe →Ayn Rand for Pragmatists
Jan 20, 2025Tap to summarizeNote: This is the first article in a two-part series on the life and thought of Ayn Rand. To watch or listen to a discussion of her work I had with Alex Epstein, see here.From the time she published her novels, it has been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes are unrealistic. When the psychologist Albert Ellis made this point in a 1967 debate with the author, Rand responded, “Am I unreal? Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”I love this exchange because it captures the boldness that made Rand a force of nature. Given her life story, it is easy to see how she could have come to see herself through a romantic lens. Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of 21, during a brief window of time when it was still possible for those living under communism to get visas to visit abroad. She ended up writing in her non-native language and becoming arguably the most influential novelist of her era, with a cult of followers who considered her an oracle with deep and penetrating insights into philosophy, science, economics, politics, and art. Through her own life experiences and fiction, Rand taught the world to dream big. With a fury that could only have come from growing up as a unique talent stuck in a totalitarian nightmare, she told us that heroes could be real, and that the progress of civilization could be understood as a romantic struggle in which beauty, truth, and the rational faculty of man have triumphed over weakness, ugliness, and the bland hateful conformity of the mob. Not only that, but we still have a role to play in this one great historical drama, despite how boring policy differences might sometimes look on the surface. Trying to find transcendental meaning through politics usually ends in disaster. But that’s because most people who take that route have false beliefs about the way the world works, and are therefore attracted to statist and authoritarian ideas. What Rand provided to the world was the joy of a Manichaean political movement – the moral certitude, the connection with others engaged in a sacred war, enemies to hate – married to the liberal ideals that have moved humanity forward. The tensions inherent in such a project worked themselves out in the incredible story of Rand’s personal life, which saw her become the leader of a movement that was riven with sex scandals, factional fighting, and the denunciation of heretics, eerily reminiscent of the social dynamics within communist movements that she spent her life denouncing. Yet rather than seeing what happened to Rand’s immediate circle as discrediting her ideas, the better lesson is to understand that truth and what most people find satisfying to believe are often in conflict, so it is no wonder that one of the twentieth century’s most successful proponents of anti-totalitarian ideas ended up becoming in certain ways similar to her enemies. There seems to be a weak or even negative correlation between how good it feels to believe in a political idea and how connected to reality it is. One of my main missions in life is to find a way to address this unfortunate aspect of human nature, and it was Rand who originally provided insights into how this might be done. If it is true she ended up going too far in her dogmatism and intolerance of dissent, she still has much to teach us in a world where defenders of capitalism have almost universally not gone far enough in standing up for what they believe is true, to the detriment of the pro-liberty movement. To say that friends of liberty have been moral squishes over the last century or more would be a radical understatement. I’ve seen this, having spent much of my life in academia. Of that time, attending the University of Chicago Law School was easily the most intellectually rewarding experience. At our 2010 orientation, Michael Schill, the then dean, told us that we were at a place where there was “no such thing as political correctness.” As he explained, there were probably more Democrats than Republicans on the faculty, but conservative ideas were still much more represented than they were elsewhere. There was a norm that if you had something to say, it’s fine, as long as you could defend it.The idea that political correctness did not exist was an exaggeration, but pressure to conform to left-wing ideas and values, particularly on sensitive topics of race and sex, mostly came from the students rather than the faculty or administration. I’m not sure how much things have changed since; it became a news story when my old First Amendment professor Geoffrey Stone announced he would no longer say the n-word in 2019. But when I was there, a white professor could use whatever word he wanted in its proper context.Beyond free-flowing racial slurs, the majority of our first-year curriculum was centered around Law and Economics, an intellectual movement that began as a critique of left-wing orthodoxy from a perspective that took markets seriously. We were constantly taught to think in terms of concepts like unintended consequences, moral hazard, and misaligned incentives. Seminars were taught by figures like Richard Posner, both a pioneer of the movement and the most cited judge in American history. The economic perspective permeated all intellectual life throughout my time at Chicago. Commonly, lectures and class discussions would center around the question of “efficiency versus values.” Efficiency on any particular issue was usually synonymous with the laissez-faire position. Values meant something like racial equity or an unquantifiable concern like privacy. It sometimes meant individual liberty too, but never in the economic sense. So free speech and the right to a fair trial were values, but not necessarily the right to sell one’s own labor for below a wage set by the government or run a business according to one’s convictions and beliefs. We were taught there was a point in American history when judges did take economic rights as seriously as other rights, and that is referred to as the Lochner era. Some professors would give Straussian defenses of the doctrines of that time, but they were generally taught to be outdated.While I was glad to be in an academic environment where pro-market ideas got a fair hearing, the efficiency versus values framing always left me unsettled. Here we had capitalism, a system that both gives primacy to the rights of the individual and also produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead of being celebrated and championed, facilitating and allowing free markets was treated as a kind of dirty task society must perform in order to achieve outcomes we want. Business and the operation of markets were like cleaning toilets. Everyone likes the end result, but the process of how you get there is unpleasant, unromantic if not embarrassing. I came to realize that this efficiency versus values dialectic exists outside of the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago Law School. In the world of empirical reality, the pro-market position continues to win. East and West Germany, North and South Korea have provided our most famous natural experiments. But even in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve seen the success of America over Europe, population and capital flowing from blue to red states within the US, and the UAE establishing the closest thing the world has to a utopia based on the free flow of goods and labor. There is no evidence that we are anywhere near the optimum amount of economic freedom anywhere in the world. Housing, the major market that has failed most in first world nations, is clearly dysfunctional due to too much government regulations. And yet, economic collectivism not only survives in the United States and across the world, but is in certain ways growing stronger. We are told by populists on both sides of the political spectrum that neoliberalism has failed and is the cause of all our problems, from the degradation of the environment to low birth rates. Such arguments are made without much in the way of reasonable comparisons to any possible alternative. There is nothing new in calls for, say, more restrictions on free trade. Such ideas have been tried, they’ve failed, and their contemporary proponents have not made any theoretical breakthroughs or pointed to compelling empirical data that can explain why we should accept them now. Populist arguments are heavy on emotion and appeals to solidarity based on identity, whether we are talking about wokeness on the left or demagogic populism on the right.Capitalism has theory and reality on its side, but has failed in the war for hearts and minds. David Broockman reports that when you get a focus group together, they’ll agree on the need for new housing but reconsider when they find out that someone might actually make money in the process of getting there. Private property and economic liberty remain respected mostly due to the inertia of our institutions, and a realization among elites that indulging too much in anti-market bias is bound ...
Transcribe →Defeat Racism by Heightening the Contradictions
Jan 17, 2025Tap to summarizeMy conversation with Jared Taylor earlier this month has opened up a schism among his white nationalist supporters. I was amused to find out that he began his last two American Renaissance podcasts by apologizing to his audience. Bizarrely, he said one of the reasons he regretted his comments was that he was talking to me, someone who has contempt for white people, which is something I haven’t heard before. Sure, you could argue that I have contempt for racial collectivists or the dysfunctional underclass of any background, but I haven’t heard anyone say I have particular animus towards whites. This is perhaps a way to calm his supporters down. Regardless, what this entire episode demonstrates is that there is a deep contradiction at the heart of white nationalism, the dissident right, or whatever you want to call it. There are basically two kinds of people within these circles. The relatively Elite Human Capital faction is secular, hierarchical, and scientific in its outlook. It reads studies about racial differences in IQ, the importance of heredity, and crime statistics. It is of course selective in the evidence it focuses on, like all political movements are, ignoring for example the overwhelming contribution that immigrants make to the United States. But these are basically smart people who care about ideas. They often went to elite schools, and have in many cases had success outside of the movement. Taylor, for example, graduated from Yale, and, having grown up in Japan and written about it, was in the 1980s considered an expert on that country in the mainstream press. There is also a Low Human Capital faction, which predominates among the audience, that is simply racist in the most primitive sense. They are egalitarians and don’t want snooty elites telling them what to do. They don’t read and are often religious, though more in a tribal than a truly spiritual sense. The world is frightening to them, and they are hostile to liberals and minorities because they represent uncertainty and change. They are often stupid and maladjusted, and have nothing to fall back on except the accomplishments of their race, which they demand credit for. While Jared Taylor spent part of his life comfortably in elite circles, his audience is composed of people who latch onto their identity out of a desperate need to maintain some sliver of self-esteem.<line x1="21"...
Transcribe →Should American Men Work at Panda Express?
Jan 16, 2025Tap to summarizeRob Henderson joined me last night on a live stream to discuss the question that has roiled right-wing twitter: should American men work at Panda Express? For background, see Rob’s coverage here. See also friend of the Substack Scott Greer, whose article we reference. Rob is amused by the Greerhead Pledge, which you can learn about from my conversation with Scott. We go into the status-money tradeoff in jobs, the reasonableness of people’s expectations, how much these anonymous rightists reflect attitudes in the rest of society, their similarities with woke, and more. We also discuss whether working at Panda Express will actually limit what kind of partner you can hope to attract. I explain why one of the beauties of immigration is that it allows you to go outside of the status hierarchy of your own society when looking for a wife. I’m big into following your dreams. Listeners shouldn’t get the impression from this conversation that I’m for income-maxing above all else. That’s not what I did, and if you truly have a passion or talent for something, go for it. What I’m objecting to here is the idea that you should tell people who are only slightly above average it is fine for them to look down on normal, everyday jobs. That’s not good either for society or encouraging people to live happy and productive lives. Read more
Transcribe →Reading/TV, Podcasts, and Elite Human Capital
Jan 13, 2025Tap to summarizeBelow is a draft of Chapter 3 of my book on Elite Human Capital. See the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. This chapter is derived in part from my popular 2021 essay, “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.”It’s been updated in a few ways. First of all, the essay was written before I started talking about the concept of Elite Human Capital. So one question I’ve been wrestling with is whether the Elite Human Capital/Low Human Capital axis is different than the Reading/TV axis, therefore necessitating a 2x2 matrix of movements and cultures, or they’re pretty much the same thing, with Reading/TV describing how different levels of human capital gather and process information and relate to those of their own tribe and adversaries. I was leaning towards the idea of two independent but related axes, and the previous drafts of chapters were written from that perspective. But, after giving the topic further thought and listening to feedback, I now think this can’t be justified and we have to treat reading and watching TV as characteristics of Elite and Low Human Capital respectively.The chapter has also been updated to take into account developments of the last three plus years. I’d say that the perspective in the original article has held up extremely well. Trump has been choosing many top officials from Fox News to staff his administration, including his pick for Secretary of Defense. New data from the 2024 election shows that Trump voters were not only less educated, but people who cared less about politics. There’s also the rise of right-wing podcasts to consider, which includes both conservatives getting their own shows like Tucker, and popular preexisting programs, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, tilting to the right. A theory that conservatives are attracted to audiovisual content more than the written word would have predicted that they would do well in podcasting, and that is what has happened. Again, reading/watching TV is a good way to understand politics. There are other changes throughout the chapter, including a new figure on conservative/liberal differences in their preferred sources of media. Once again, please leave any feedback you might have, including spelling and grammatical mistakes. Elite Human Capital usually tilts towards classical liberalism. Yet individuals with classical liberal instincts and a concern for truth are sometimes relatively evenly divided between various factions within a political culture. As late as 2012, the Republican candidate for president won a majority of college educated whites. Even then, however, the trend was for the more EHC part of the population to identify with the left, and Trump can be seen as an accelerant that pushed an already ongoing realignment forward.[1]Things have now gone so far that there is no longer much risk in collapsing the study of human capital and political differences into the same analysis when talking about the United States. Volumes could be written on the cultural differences between communities at various levels of human capital, just as how one could spend a lifetime studying cultural differences between an isolated tribe and citizens of a modern developed nation. The main purpose of this chapter is to discuss what makes modern conservatives and liberals in the United States, and the cultures that each builds, different, with a special focus on the most policy and politically relevant aspects of the contrast. At the same time, I also emphasize that Elite Human Capital is not necessarily always liberal, noting how clearly right-leaning movements like the Taliban can sometimes share characteristics similar to those of the American left. Read more
Transcribe →Thoughts on Being a California Fire Refugee
Jan 10, 2025Tap to summarizeTuesday was when the Santa Ana winds fully hit. Here East of Los Angeles in some of the nicer suburbs we have palm trees everywhere, and when the wind blows fast the streets and sidewalks become littered with their leaves. They’re really not “leaves” in the way you think of them. They’re more like these long sticks that are fun to pick up and play with. We had heard about a fire that was ripping through Pacific Palisades on the coast but very far away, though the palm leaves buildup was like nothing we had seen before. At one point I had to stop my car and remove a whole row of them from the road before proceeding. In the evening, however, the Eaton Canyon fire broke out and the power went off at around 9PM. I went to bed, thinking this would be over by the next morningAs sometimes happens, I woke up around 1 AM and checked my phone. There was a text from my neighbor asking whether we had fled the scene yet. It turned out we were under a mandatory evacuation order, with the apocalyptic scene of the spread of the flames of the Eaton fire in the nearby mountains visible from the driveway. We were soon out of there, all five members of the family, plus the nanny. The leaves of the California fan palmWe thought we’d go ten minutes southeast and find a hotel. But all the power was still out when we made it to what we thought would be our destination. It was so dark that I tried to meet Wife’s car at a restaurant to coordinate where we were going, but when I got to the busy intersection, I couldn’t tell where it was. Major roads and side streets were indistinguishable. After finally meeting at a Sprouts parking lot, the store being the only beacon of light in the area, we were able to coordinate and ended up in a town inland about 20 miles away.The next morning, I did my prescheduled appearance on Rising from the hotel on why Trump should buy Greenland. I like to find excuses to work in situations like this, and it was a nice diversion. Doing the interview while being a fire refugee provided a sense of meaning because it made me feel like I was sacrificing for this important cause. Read more
Transcribe →Should America Buy Greenland?
Jan 7, 2025Tap to summarizeI never took the “buy Greenland” stuff seriously. Yet Trump may have been more earnest than most people think. After tweeting about the possibility in 2019 and being rebuffed by the Danish Prime Minister, he took the step of abruptly cancelling a planned trip to Copenhagen. Trump has recently reiterated his wish to buy the territory, and Don Jr. just made a surprise trip there this week.The more I think about it, the more I believe that this should be a major priority of the Trump administration and that it’s not exactly impossible. My estimation of this eventually happening has gone from under 1% to maybe 2%, over say a thirty-year time horizon. But that crosses the threshold to be high enough for the possibility to be worth considering as a thought experiment. And at this rate of increase it’ll be a sure thing by next month anyway.Denmark gained control over Greenland in the early eighteenth century when missionaries and traders from Denmark-Norway established a presence on the island, seeking to convert the Inuit population to Christianity and integrate the territory into their trade network. It eventually officially became a Danish colony in 1814 after the dissolution of the Danish-Norwegian union at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule, and in 2009, it gained greater autonomy while remaining part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with control over most internal affairs but relying on Denmark for defense and foreign policy. Greenland is a sparsely populated land with about 57,000 people. About 10% are Europeans and the rest are natives. Its GDP per capita is $57,000 per year, which is not bad at all by global standards but significantly worse off than the rest of Denmark. Yet its standard of living is highly subsidized. Approximately 20% of Greenland’s GDP, or half of its government budget, comes from the Danish government. The territory has been said to be on a slow roll towards independence, but it’s hard to imagine what that would look like given its complete economic reliance on the home country. The small population is due in part to its unforgiving geography. About 80% of Greenland is covered by a literal block of ice called the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is 1.7 million square miles, and over two miles deep at its thickest points.Greenlanders don’t appear particularly attached to Denmark to begin with, with the Prime Minister of the territory recently declaring that they should form their own nation, and polls showing majority support for that position. However, they seem to be a practical people. In 2017, 78% of Greenlanders said they would oppose independence if it meant a fall in living standards. So they want to be their own country, but not the responsibilities that would entail. In the end, being part of the United States, the most powerful empire in the history of the world where all races are equally welcome, may start to look like a much more enticing prospect than being ruled as a welfare dependent of a tiny and not particularly distinguished European country. Greenlanders seem pretty lethargic and easily malleable, desiring independence but not enough to want to do much to gain it, and becoming Americans could perhaps provide some excitement to what seem like very boring lives.I have to say that emotionally, I like the idea. Americans are living well but pessimistic about their politics. The things that voters care about are mostly silly. Immigrants do not commit much crime and are not reducing your standard of living, but improving it. When Kamala pivoted away from wokeness, she had no message other than being nice to people and reducing the price of insulin. This is more sympathetic than Republicans’ hate filled politics, but too small to inspire anyone.If America has problems, it is still morally and culturally superior to the rest of the world. Its destiny is to dissolve borders and distinct cultures, which are annoying and stupid. We do this by welcoming the world here and making it more like us abroad. Most of this is done without any planning. American pop culture and economic dynamism are magnets for Elite Human Capital all over the world, whether they move here or stay home and simply find our society much more exciting than their own. There is bound to be a great deal of heartache and destruction in the process. But there is no such thing as the preservation of cultures or nations in the modern world. It’s like a person who gives up on self-improvement and decides he’s going to do whatever it takes to keep his life just as it is now. This is impossible to do and still maintain the kind of existence that makes one human. You grow older, people in your life die, new opportunities arise that must be seized if you are to maintain any will to live at all. If you do sink into the same routine, the result will be ...
Transcribe →At the 90th Percentile of Ayn Rand Appreciation
Jan 6, 2025Tap to summarizeAlex Epstein (X, Substack) is a philosopher, energy expert, and the author of two New York Times bestselling books: Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.Alex and I met a few years ago through our mutual friend Bryan Caplan. A couple of months ago we were talking and he asked me how much Ayn Rand I had read. I mentioned that I’d gone through Atlas Shrugged when I was in my teens or early twenties, and by chance had picked up The Romantic Manifesto not that long before we spoke. One thing led to another, and the last few months I’ve been going through all of her published books. I’ve also read the Anne Heller biography, which the Ayn Rand Institute hates but Bryan and I both found captivating. Alex lives in Los Angeles, so we decided to meet for a podcast to discuss her ideas and work. In this conversation, I fear that I come across as not that big of a Rand fan, though that is only in comparison to Alex. As I say during the discussion, I’m probably at the 90th percentile of Ayn Rand appreciators and he’s at the 99th percentile. To me, her greatest contributions were providing a moral foundation for capitalism and a framework for self-help. I believe if you adopt Ayn Rand’s philosophy, you will both be happier and have generally correct political and moral views. We get into the question of whether Rand is anti-natalist, or even anti-family. I think kids are conspicuous by their absence in her works, and family relations are usually portrayed negatively. Alex provides a different perspective. We also go into Rand’s personal life, what if anything it tells us about her philosophy, and which novels we like more or less. I’m personally partial to We the Living, while Alex likes The Fountainhead the best. There are a few spoilers here regarding Atlas Shrugged, but none for her other fiction books. I’ll be writing more about Rand and her ideas in the coming weeks. For those who want to start reading her work, or perhaps reconnect with it, the Ayn Rand Institute allows students to get one of her books for free.Most if not all of her published essays can be found online. Below are a handful that we mentioned throughout this conversation.“Racism” (1963)“What Is Capitalism?” (1965)“Of Living Death,” (1968) on the Catholic Church’s views on contraception and sex (text, Rand speech)“Philosophy: Who Needs It?” (1974) (text, audio of speech at West Point)
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