Philosopher Queens and the Return of Deliberative Politics

A return of the norms of rational political life?

Real estate agents have maxims buyers and sellers rarely hear, that are shared among realtors, especially elder realtors wisely informing newly licensed baby realtors about the ironies of this industry:

“Buyers are liars.”

“You want to be someone’s first love, second spouse, and third realtor.”

“In a good transaction, everyone will leave the settlement table a little bit unhappy.”

I still haven’t read The Art of the Deal, though it’s on my metaphorical nightstand. But I am thinking those who’ve been through many real estate transactions are going to best understand the next four years.

The Republican Party and the MAGA movement, particularly on X, have debated topics, including who should be Speaker of the House, and what should be allowed in terms of legal immigration, in particular the H1B Visa program. Democrat influencers crowed gleefully that President Trump’s supporters were engaged in factional infighting - MSNBC Executive Producer Kyle Griffin tweeting “MAGA diehards are already attacking Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump isn't even in office yet.” Democrats had gone from primaries made semi-irrelevant by a Politburo of super-delegates at their conventions, to having no primaries at all. As comedian Whitney Cummings observed, “It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate. Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.” Unable to imagine primaries, it's not surprising Democrats couldn’t understand what they were seeing when other people actually had a policy debate.

This H1B debate was probably the most informative exchange that’s ever happened on social media. On the one side were people initially defending the H1B program and expanded legal immigration, including Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and Scott Adams; on the other many dissident right pundits, including my fave, Peachy Keenan. Many of them, particularly Adams and Ramaswamy, realized that what was going on was not war, but discussion.

Vivek decided to play Life of Pi and throw some chum to excite the sharks by saying Americans weren’t really hard working (and disciplined studying) enough to create Silicon Valley on their own, without taking in the far right tip (but just the tip) of India’s bell curve:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

Not as widely read, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, seconded Ramaswamy’s charge that Americans are too ignorant to engineer software or choose good policies, with a substack post with an argument by analogy (or fallacy of analogy?) on how nuclear power and H1B immigration are alike in that they are both too complex for ignorant and easily scared people to understand.

Vivek quickly recovered in subsequent tweets from his rhetorical fail (Caplan not yet). Everyone slowly came to agree that American K-12 (and university) education was such a failure it was preventing the United States from producing the caliber of high level STEM workers it needs. Everyone agreed that the H1B program is flawed and corrupt, granting 800,000 Visas when by law it should be only 80,000, granting Visas to people in fields like accounting for which it was not intended, and placing the H1B Visa holder in a kind of indentured servitude where they cannot seek other jobs from other employers, thereby depressing their salaries and the salaries of everyone else in the same field. For free marketers, defending the H1B program is like defending treaties and other systems of government managed trade that do free up some exchanges between some parties, but only within a system of central planning that has its own goals unrelated to those of market participants.

There are lots of America First pundits who replied to the libertarian/TechBro defenders of the H1B program (or some reformed version of it). But I think the best was from the pseudonymous humorist and tradmom of five, Mrs. Peachy Keenan. And something almost as important as noting the return of actual policy debates to the public sphere is I think noting that a comic writer who thinks of herself as a mom concerned about her children’s future and someone who just wants to write fiction and her substack and bangers on X is emerging as a philosopher. A philosopher who last year made us reflect on motherhood, parents, children, and maternal love, and this year is going to make us reflect on citizenship, sovereignty, and what it means to be an American. Mrs. Keenan asks:

Is an American:

• Anyone who believes in the Idea of America? If so, what is this idea? If you live in, say, Madagascar, and you believe in this idea, does that make you American? Or is the idea geolocated; it only works when you believe in the idea AND you are inside one of the 50 states? Also, there are plenty of people who were born here who do not believe in this idea; they hate the founders, the Constitution, etc. Are they still American?

• Anyone who steps foot on the Magic Dirt between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? What makes the dirt so magical? Is it enough just to make the journey and fill out a few papers?

• Anyone who can game our retarded border system, asylum system, and visa system to get a ticket to JFK?

Or is it something more?

One of the things that’s interesting about this series of questions is that it doesn’t lend itself to answers like “blood and soil” nationalism, which Ann Coulter edged into with her (no doubt true) assumption that the Scotch-Irish and other Anglo settlers of the U.S. did have a cultural commitment to classical liberalism and the rule of law not shared by all nationalities. (Incidentally, Mrs. Keenan’s status as a (political) philosopher does not depend on what her answers to these questions are or whether we agree with them; it’s based on her seeing and articulating questions.)

Mrs. Peachy Keenan, Philosopher Queen

But it does (and Keenan goes on in her substack article to elaborate) make you wonder whether the explosion of productivity economists like Caplan say will happen when we allow skilled people to work (which may require letting them immigrate to liberal societies) is sustainable if these immigrants undermine, or do not understand and support, the liberal capitalist economies that allow their skills to be productive. A number of libertarians, like polemicist Todd Seavey, charge that opposing H1B amounts to affirmative action: “Banning immigrants from jobs in the U.S. is just affirmative action for white people and should be seen as embarrassing—especially to anyone with obnoxious pretensions to being the best ethnic group ever. Maybe you are. Prove it in the marketplace, bro.” But the existence of that marketplace may require that a sufficient part of the population - and of the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes of that population - are part of a culture that supports that marketplace.

Which means that as with any real estate transaction, or any negotiation, there will be a compromise that settles on something that is as much a matter of art as of science: what is the number of immigrants a country should absorb in any given period of time.

I think both sides are going to assume that they are “right” and that their winning means the other side must lose. But attend to the language used by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement:

“America First” - Mrs. Keenan and others will say America is for Americans. Americans come first. But of course we need to know what an American is, something neither a biologist, nor a (single) Supreme Court Justice can tell us. But if part of what being an American is is to support individual liberty, including the freedom of movement, and the freedom to seek jobs or to offer them, it will be difficult to say a native-born (or other) American citizen always must take priority over an individual who happens to not (yet) be a citizen. It would also mean economic doom, and ensure national inferiority, as China or some other power collected not only rare earth minerals or stole intellectual property, but also employed the best minds America had turned away.

“Not sending their best” - This locution Trump employed in his first campaign employs the fundamental distinction of all moral thinking, better and worse. Pundits suffering from TDS fixated on the implied “worst,” claiming Trump was exhibiting his racism against immigrants. Eight years later, after we’ve seen dozens of girls raped and murdered by immigrants, and learned that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris allowed in tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who had been incarcerated in their home countries for violent crime, we are still fixating on only one half of the dyad of better and worse, without getting a look at the whole eidos. America First immigration restrictionists have a narrative in which they are Trump’s original supporters, and the libertarian TechBros are a kind of ideological immigrant who should know their place as Johnny-come-latelies. But the implication of the phrase is that if other countries DID send their best, it would be much more welcome than who they are sending now.

The two sides are going to have to leave the settlement table each without feeling they got everything they asked for. You can’t take in a whole new upper middle and upper class that does not support a country’s ideals, nor can you take them in if you can’t also provide, hope, growth, and family-supporting middle and upper-middle class jobs and opportunities for the original population. (Welfare statism and regulated, sclerotic economies make this worse.) You also can’t have economic growth and be a world superpower if you don’t have the best and the brightest working for you.

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As a coda I should note that some of the discussion was on a much lower level than Keenan or Vivek or Scott Adams, and consisted of people making the charge that Elon Musk or Ramaswamy support H1B Visas or immigration because it gives them cheap(er) labor.

Do they really need more money? Couldn’t they educate their own American born engineers and indenture them to their companies via student loans and contracts? Have all their actions whereby they risked the enmity of the political class and the Democrat Party shown that they are primarily motivated by profit margins?

However, one other writer did have an interesting suggestion about Elon and the H1B debate, worth considering though I don’t necessarily agree with her. After the H1B debate began raging on X, Elon initiated a discussion on X and a policy change within X, that have each grown to be larger conflagrations. Newsweek opinion editorBatya Ungar-Sargon has a theory: “If you can't tell that this new obsession with rape gangs in the UK is a giant effort to distract from the H-1B debacle and X reverting to the censorship regime of Twitter, I have a bridge to sell you. Disappointing to see folks falling for this.” Elon is actually weighing for and against candidates in parties in several countries, including Germany. Given how awake he seems to have become politically, this seems to me a natural impulse that would not be limited to only the one country he happens to live in currently. But one could watch what he chooses to begin campaigning about and when, to see if Ms. Ungar-Sargon has identified a tactic he uses.

A version of this was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.