TLP Weekend Edition (June 7-8, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📰 “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice,” by Michael Sandel. An oldie but a goodie—one that remains as relevant as ever. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel argued that the Democratic Party, whose coalition is home to a growing number of credentialed professionals, had erroneously come to believe that the only way for people to get ahead in a post-industrial age was through more formal education. But, as Sandel writes:
The politicians espousing [this] have missed the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they are offering: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault…By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism—an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees…
The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris…Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.
“Less educated” is a lousy term but Sandel’s point is still a good one.
🇨🇳 “China's Abundance Problem—and Ours,” by Lauren Teixeira. On her new Substack, Lauren Teixeira digs into the flip side of “abundance” with a detailed review of one particularly horrific example of Chinese overbuilding: the Beijing Daxing Airport.
You’ve probably heard about Abundance. If you’ve been under a rock: some big brain guys have coalesced around the idea that America makes it too hard to build stuff like housing and trains; that unnecessary regulation slows down projects while “citizen voice” statutes let incumbents block pretty much anything; and that we should do a bunch of policy reforms to unleash an era of big beautiful infrastructure. I find this all pretty hard to object to…
China plays a crucial role in Abundance discourse by serving as an example of what we could have, if not for the stranglehold of the regulatory state and tedious citizen input processes. Abundance guys point to China’s tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail; to forests of high-rise apartment buildings ripped straight from a YIMBY fever dream.
I find myself getting oddly territorial whenever I encounter this part of discourse, as if, you know, I invented being obsessed with Chinese infrastructure. Which of course I didn’t. But I did spend a lot of my twenties wandering around the Chinese built environment, and thinking about it, and writing about it. And a lot of that writing had to do with what is now an important theme of Abundance discourse, which is the tradeoff between protecting citizens from harm and building big.
Back then I was very preoccupied with the phenomenon of destruction and forced resettlement, or chai-qian (literally: destroy-move). I wrote a bunch of articles about it, including one about an artist colony in Beijing and one about a historic neighborhood in Nanjing. These were only very tiny instances of a phenomenon so enormous in scale it can be hard to get any mental purchase on it. During China’s most frenetic period of building, you would see about a Robert Moses’s lifetime’s worth of chaiqian in a week. The displacement toll from the Three Gorges Dam alone is thought to have amounted to around 1.5 million people....
As I’ve gotten older I’ve...become more circumspect about chaiqian. I still think the amount of demolition and displacement was excessive—but a lot of it was inevitable, and necessary. When you are living through the most rapid economic transformation of all time, it is somewhat unavoidable that you will be tossed around by the bulldozer of history.
For what it’s worth every Chinese person with whom I discussed chaiqian (aside from those directly affected) was extraordinarily unsentimental about it. Whenever I would bring it up, my interlocutor would grin and invoke a mythical class of people called the “chai-er-dai” or second-generation displaced—people supposedly generationally wealthy due to resettlement compensation.
In the end I guess where I come boringly down on this tradeoff is that there is probably, to bastardize the old Stalinist adage about omelettes, an optimal amount of egg-cracking to be done. China cracked too many eggs, and America too few. Now China has a bunch of rotting useless omelettes and we’re starving for them.
🌥️ “The Weather Forecast That Saved D-Day,” by Christopher Klein. For the 81st anniversary of D-Day, Klein offers readers a great historical anecdote about the critical role that luck—and shrewd weather forecasting from a small station in western Ireland—played in preserving the Allies’ element of surprise on June 6, 1944:
German Luftwaffe meteorologists, however, relied on less sophisticated data and models than their Allied counterparts, says John Ross, author of The Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble. “The Allies had a much more robust network of weather stations in Canada, Greenland and Iceland; of weather ships and weather flights over the North Atlantic and observations by secret agreement from weather stations in the neutral Republic of Ireland,” he says.
Those weather stations, in particular one at a post office at Blacksod Point in the far west of Ireland, proved crucial in detecting the arrival of a lull in the storms that Stagg and his colleagues believed would allow for an invasion on June 6. As rain and high winds lashed Portsmouth on the night of June 4, Stagg informed Eisenhower of the forecast for a temporary break. With the next available date for an invasion nearly two weeks away, the Allies risked losing the element of surprise if they waited. In spite of the pelting rain and howling winds outside, Eisenhower placed his faith in his forecasters and gave the go-ahead for D-Day.
And who says talking about the weather is just idle chit chat?! (h/t: RealClearPolitics)
🎾 The French Open, Women’s and Men’s Finals, live on TNT and truTV. It’s the battle of the top seeds at Roland Garros in Paris. First up, American No. 2 seed Coco Gauff faces off with world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the women’s final at 9AM EST on Saturday. Then on Sunday, world No. 1 Jannik Sinner takes on No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz in the men’s final after the Italian defeated the all-time great Novak Djokovic in what is likely Nole’s last appearance on the French clay.
🎸 That’s the Price of Loving Me, by Dean Wareham. Ex-Galaxie 500 and Luna guitarist/songwriter Dean Wareham recently put out a new solo record that makes a splendid companion for a laid-back June weekend. Wareham produced the album with his old buddy Kramer from back in the Galaxie days and “features his wife, Britta Phillips, on bass, as well as contributions from drummers Roger Brogan (Spectrum, Alison’s Halo) and Anthony LaMarca (the War on Drugs), as well as cellist Gabe Noel.”
TLP is looking forward to hearing this new track “Bourgeois Manqué” live this Sunday night at the Bond Street Bar in Asbury Park, NJ. Enjoy!
Had D-Day not occurred on the scheduled day, the backup was June 20. That was the day of the great Channel storm that was not predicted and wrecked the American Mulberry with heavy damage to the British one. An invasion on that day would have been a shambles.
I live in a university town of about 70k people that is adjacent to rural farming communities. The college town is 80% liberal. The surrounding communities are 60% conservative, and would be a higher percentage of conservative except for the scarcity development policies of the liberal college town with an ever expanding university population that has driven local real estate prices to the roof ($2600/mth for a crappy single bedroom apartment) and thus sent more liberals to live in surrounding communities where the real estate is a bit less expensive.
I own business in the liberal university town and the more conservative towns. I have family that live in the Midwest, and I have lived here in a blue coastal state for nearly 50 years.
I have a foot in each political culture.
Here is what I know.
The left-liberal places are filled with people that are highly educated, can speak and write well... but are more aloof and unwise. The right-conservative places that are less educated, cannot speak nor write well, but are more pragmatic, focused and wise.
My explanation for this goes back to my public school days. There were kids that didn't have the academic genes. They had to scrap and dig to make it through school with their B average. However, much of the reason is their background, DNA, personality and brain wiring was to invent, make, build, grow and fix things. In terms of social status, many of these kids dominated the nerds that participated on drama class and took AP classes to nurture their A average. But these "smarter" and "gifted" kids were insecure around those that could make and fix real things with their psychical selves... including their efforts on the sports fields.
The positive feedback loop of academic success plus the insecurity to compete with the productive-minded kids in a launched career, cause the "smarter" kids to enroll in college where they would get a credential that would be a fake tonic for their insecurity around their lacking productive skills and tendencies. Now armed with a degree and certification, and enhanced rhetorical skills, they could just denigrate those producer-class, non-college-educated people lacking their prestigious credentials and rhetorical skills.
The problem here is that the grade school nerd syndrome was a defect... an emotional, cognitive and physiological disorder that required counseling to overcome. Chronic hypersensitivity, insecurity and risk-aversion are debilitating tendencies. The schools should have been helping these kids build coping skills, resilience, self-awareness and self-confidence. The schools did not do this, and we increased the number of these kids pushed into higher learning. The information economy did open up many career paths for these people... they grew wealthy in these professional laptop class jobs despite the inability to produce anything of real value. Their careers are actually in the looting side... extracting from the productive economy powered by their producer-class status enemies.
When left liberals concentrate into a community the democratic process normalized these disorders. You can track the outcomes with real data. Every community or state dominated by liberal Democrats is a mess and in constant decline.
But there is a constant motivation of these people to control and own the productive class (we saw it explode during the destructive authoritarian power wielding of Democrats during the pandemic). They cannot accept an abundance policy approach, because that favors their human status hierarchy enemy from their grade school days.