Rufo was surprisingly weak. You were gently asking some sharp questions, and he didn't have good answers or even seem to have thought about them before.
If Marcuse enjoyed the benefits of living in the West all his life but couldn't even say that the US was better than the Soviet Union (good question!), that would seem to disqualify him as an honest thinker and writer. If Marcuse could not or would not try to persuade or at least honestly rebut the arguments of political opponents, in what sense was he an intellectual at all? And it's weird to call the author of "Repressive Tolerance" a "libertarian socialist;" that might possibly apply to Chomsky, who at least forthrightly stands up for free speech, whatever else you might say about him.
Rufo seemed to be walking a bizarre line of defending the intellectual acumen and integrity of his subjects and denying they were evil while also saying their ideas were horrible and always lead to mass murder, as should have been obvious to them. It seemed like a version of the starry-eyed progressive notion that only intentions (or purported intentions) matter. I'm beginning to understand why the NYT gave him editorial space.
Maybe Rufo was having a bad day. But he came across as much more of a lightweight than I expected.
The big difference between Caplan and Rufo seems attitudinal rather than intellectual.
- Caplan wants to hold sources and methods to a high standard.
- Rufo takes a broad church approach, happy to find value in all kinds of different sources and methods.
- Caplan thinks that if someone was highly culpable for doing bad things, they're a bad person. I can almost hear him wanting to ask Rufo, "What else could it mean to be a wicked person?"
- Rufo reserves moral judgement on men's souls, even as he finds fault in their actions.
An extremely interesting interview, and highly productive.
Rufo: These people's actions are evil, what actions do I take do I stop them?
Caplan: These people are evil, let me write about it on my blog.
I think they are talking past each other because Rufo is more interested in influencing real world outcomes then winning intellectual debates. Classifying these people as evil or not doesn't bring about school choice.
The point about right-wing elected officials interfering with institutions so dominated by their opponents that it seems like illegitimate interference reminded me of these posts:
One possible reason many libertarians dislike Ruso is that they are at heart, left-wing on cultural issues, i.e. emotionally anti-religious, anti-tradition, feminist, unfamiliar with the ideas of Becker and Sowell on race, and even sympathetic to wokism to some degree.
It seems unfortunate that all the discussion with Rufo about his "anti-libertarianism" was focused on what role the government should have in government institutions, which as he correctly points out, is not a strictly libertarian question, and not his support for suppression of strictly private speech, and other strictly private behaviors, which is unambiguously anti-libertarian.
I was especially disappointed that Bryan didn't ask him about his anti-immigration comments listed there, given that Bryan specifically noted Rufo supposedly never criticizing immigration, in his solicitation for reader questions for Rufo:
>Unlike almost every other “populist,” I’ve yet to hear Rufo say one demagogic word against immigration
@ 57:00 So will New College of Florida have courses in postmodern thought, queer theory, and the like that are taught in a neutral dispassionate survey way, or will they be banned because most of the work in those fields calls for activism and denies basic liberal foundations?
Rufo was surprisingly weak. You were gently asking some sharp questions, and he didn't have good answers or even seem to have thought about them before.
If Marcuse enjoyed the benefits of living in the West all his life but couldn't even say that the US was better than the Soviet Union (good question!), that would seem to disqualify him as an honest thinker and writer. If Marcuse could not or would not try to persuade or at least honestly rebut the arguments of political opponents, in what sense was he an intellectual at all? And it's weird to call the author of "Repressive Tolerance" a "libertarian socialist;" that might possibly apply to Chomsky, who at least forthrightly stands up for free speech, whatever else you might say about him.
Rufo seemed to be walking a bizarre line of defending the intellectual acumen and integrity of his subjects and denying they were evil while also saying their ideas were horrible and always lead to mass murder, as should have been obvious to them. It seemed like a version of the starry-eyed progressive notion that only intentions (or purported intentions) matter. I'm beginning to understand why the NYT gave him editorial space.
Maybe Rufo was having a bad day. But he came across as much more of a lightweight than I expected.
But for you, great interview.
The big difference between Caplan and Rufo seems attitudinal rather than intellectual.
- Caplan wants to hold sources and methods to a high standard.
- Rufo takes a broad church approach, happy to find value in all kinds of different sources and methods.
- Caplan thinks that if someone was highly culpable for doing bad things, they're a bad person. I can almost hear him wanting to ask Rufo, "What else could it mean to be a wicked person?"
- Rufo reserves moral judgement on men's souls, even as he finds fault in their actions.
An extremely interesting interview, and highly productive.
Rufo: These people's actions are evil, what actions do I take do I stop them?
Caplan: These people are evil, let me write about it on my blog.
I think they are talking past each other because Rufo is more interested in influencing real world outcomes then winning intellectual debates. Classifying these people as evil or not doesn't bring about school choice.
The end of the interview of the best.
The stuff on the academics was kind of boring.
The point about right-wing elected officials interfering with institutions so dominated by their opponents that it seems like illegitimate interference reminded me of these posts:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/plutocracy-the-alternative-to-caesarism
One possible reason many libertarians dislike Ruso is that they are at heart, left-wing on cultural issues, i.e. emotionally anti-religious, anti-tradition, feminist, unfamiliar with the ideas of Becker and Sowell on race, and even sympathetic to wokism to some degree.
It seems unfortunate that all the discussion with Rufo about his "anti-libertarianism" was focused on what role the government should have in government institutions, which as he correctly points out, is not a strictly libertarian question, and not his support for suppression of strictly private speech, and other strictly private behaviors, which is unambiguously anti-libertarian.
I raised these here: https://betonit.substack.com/p/what-should-i-ask-chris-rufo/comment/21049013 where Bryan invited questions for Rufo, and I'm disappointed that Bryan didn't ask him about any of these.
I was especially disappointed that Bryan didn't ask him about his anti-immigration comments listed there, given that Bryan specifically noted Rufo supposedly never criticizing immigration, in his solicitation for reader questions for Rufo:
>Unlike almost every other “populist,” I’ve yet to hear Rufo say one demagogic word against immigration
@ 57:00 So will New College of Florida have courses in postmodern thought, queer theory, and the like that are taught in a neutral dispassionate survey way, or will they be banned because most of the work in those fields calls for activism and denies basic liberal foundations?