Conflict and competence

Why fanaticism loses in the long run

[I see that Tyler Cowen’s link to my previous post brought me some new readers. To be clear, the answer to Tyler’s question: Have recessions disappeared? is “no”.]

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), students persecuted people that had relatively high levels of education. Many professionals were sent to the countryside and roughly a million people died (500,000 to 2 million—no one knows the exact figure.) In the Chinese film To Live (1994), there is a heartbreaking scene where the formerly arrogant students realize that they need experts to help them out. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the scene:

Months later, during Fengxia's childbirth, her parents and husband accompany her to the county hospital. All doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being over educated, and the students are left as the only ones in charge after they have "overthrown" the doctors. Wan Erxi manages to find a doctor to oversee the birth, removing him from confinement, but he is very weak from starvation. Fugui purchases seven steamed buns (mantou) for him and the family decides to name the son Mantou, after the buns. Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious. The family is helpless, and Fengxia dies.

This was one of those great Zhang Yimou/Gong Li films, the sort of thing that can no longer be made in China because it graphically shows the harm done by 27 years of Maoist rule. (Even in 1994, it wasn’t screened there.) The CCP has moved away from the extreme fanaticism of this period, but they now fear that exposing Mao’s crimes would undercut the Communist Party’s legitimacy. In most respects, life in China today is far better than in 1994, but China has regressed in terms of political and artistic freedom.

The Cultural Revolution is a particularly extreme example of a much more general phenomenon, the war on competency by political fanatics. America furnishes many recent examples of this phenomenon.

You’ve probably read about how recent advances in AI pose grave threats to the cybersecurity of US agencies, including the military. So which company is best qualified to address those threats, and how is the US government treating that company? Here’s Dean Ball:

The U.S. Department of War, and the federal government more broadly, are engaged in a lawfare campaign against Anthropic whose underlying motivations are deeply unclear and which attacks core American values. Now, the strategic wisdom looks worse and worse by the week. We are fighting a war against Iran, a highly capable cyberoffensive actor. It is inconceivable that the government can have a healthy relationship with the frontier AI industry while attempting to destroy what is arguably the field’s leading company. Anthropic and the Department of War must come to a truce, if not a resolution, as soon as possible, for the good of America’s national defense.

If you are MAGA, you are probably wondering why we should listen to radical libs suffering from TDS. Would your view change if you learned that as recently as last year, Dean Ball was a senior White House advisor on AI and emerging technologies?

The Trump administration has been relentlessly purging government officials that are not suitably MAGA from the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence agencies and the military. Almost as many four and five-star generals have been fired in the past 14 months as in the previous 150 years. But generals that object to executing criminal suspects in the Caribbean without a trial are certainly not “radical libs”. And we wonder why the administration failed to anticipate that the Strait of Hormuz might be shut down.

For the past 14 months, the administration has used every opportunity to mock and belittle the Europeans. They have threatened war over Greenland. They have provided support to enemies of the EU, essentially advocating for its destruction. They have campaigned for Putin supporters. They have launched repeated trade wars against Europe.

And when the Strait of Hormuz was closed, the Administration seemed puzzled that the Europeans were not anxious to rush to assist the US in a war that was launched without congressional consent and with no clear justification provided.

At an emotional level, I understand the appeal of “fight, fight, fight” and “own the libs”. Fanaticism is fun. The Cultural Revolution was fun. Unfortunately, when you get into trouble you are likely to discover that most competent people are “libs”. Not liberals in the American sense of left wing, rather liberals in the broader sense of principled supporters of classical liberal ideals. I regard Dean Ball as a sort of conservative liberal.

Almost every single day, I notice things that remind me of those arrogant students in the film To Live. Even Marco Rubio is only competent in a relative sense, that is, compared to officials like Pete Hegseth. After all, Rubio initially implied that Israel dragged us into the war, which is both a false claim and an assertion likely to further inflame anti-semitism:

Why now? Well, there’s two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders. It was automatic, and in fact it beared to be true because, in fact, the – within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north for that matter had already been activated to launch. In fact, those had already been pre-positioned.

The third is the assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the President made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.

I am certainly no fan of the Netanyahu government, and I believe that he gave Trump bad advice. But Israel is not where I’d point the finger of blame in this case—the US is powerful enough to make its own decisions.

In addition to the extraordinarily incompetent Pete Hegseth, we have Kristi Noem of Homeland Security, who somehow took a highly popular policy (stop illegal migration) and handled her job so poorly that she had to be fired. Unfortunately, she was replaced by an equally incompetent individual, Markwayne Mullin. And I don’t say that because he’s the only US senator that lacks a college degree (college is overrated), rather because he lacks the emotional maturity required to handle an important government position:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, used his opening statement to confront Mullin for reportedly calling him a “freaking snake” and saying he “completely” understands why a neighbor assaulted Paul in 2017. . . .

“I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force,” Paul said.

Mullin was confirmed despite his refusal to apologize to Paul. Younger readers have no idea how much this country has changed in the past 50 years.

On economic policy we have Peter Navarro, who botched the initial tariff plan so badly that Trump had to quickly backtrack, creating the “TACO” reputation that the Iranians recently exploited to their advantage. In 1980, Margaret Thatcher famously said “the lady's not for turning". No one will ever say that about the current administration. (Actually, maybe that’s a good thing.)

The Justice Department was once at least partially (not entirely) shielded from politics. Here’s AI Overview:

In 2010, out of over 162,000 federal cases, grand juries declined to indict in only 11 instances.

Today, the Justice Department has become so politicized that it is increasingly unable to get even formerly compliant grand juries to indict people. In several instances, they tried to prosecute critics of the Trump administration and were laughed out of court. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently met the same fate as Noem.

Of course it is not all bad news. During 2020, the Trump administration proved to be highly competent in speeding the development of new vaccines. It’s good to know that our health care policy is in safe hands if there is another pandemic.

Oh wait . . .

Fortunately, fanatics often end up being their own worst enemies. In the long run, competence generally wins out. Unfortunately, fanatics can do a lot of damage before they are defeated.

I’ll give Trump credit in one respect. He’s willing to back off before the damage gets too great.

Oh wait . . .

PS. Finally, some good news! (Vance campaigned for Orbán, who lost in a landslide.)

Photo by Carlos Cantero on Unsplash

Orbán, Putin and Vance are all having a bad day. :)