#urpriest

you can’t judge something properly without studying it anyway! and it’s certainly helpful to understand all the reasons why people might do stupid shitty things, without necessarily endorsing all the things that they do.

also “the Aztecs were not uniquely barbarous in a way that justifies their slaughter” is a highly defensible position in a way that “Aztec sacrifices were cool and good and most of the victims actually wanted to be killed” is not.

presumably you would see a free market of very expensive universities that charge ridiculous fees to people who want to hobnob with the rich, and universities that try to attract the best in order to do ground breaking research that gets government grants and commercialisation opportunities, and universities that try to do the best job at preparing people for the workforce so they can claim some portion of your future salary as fees.

I’m not a Leftist or a Latin America specialist, so I don’t know as much about this subject as I should, but for understanding US foreign policy during the contest with the USSR, I think it’s enough to understand that the US believed that the USSR was an existential threat to the US, and anything that helped the USSR increased that threat.

The US was especially anxious about communism. The USSR might have influence in non-communist states, but those states would always be less threatening than communist states, whether or not those communists happened to be Soviet clients. They were far less likely to directly threaten the US or its allies. They made far fewer credible or lasting commitments to the USSR. And they did not spread international communism.

That was mostly true, but the emphasis on ‘communism’ biased US threat perceptions. The US had false negatives (Cuba), false positives (Iran, Guatemala), true negatives that nonetheless threatened US interests (Egypt), and true positives that many US policymakers were convinced were false positives (China, Vietnam). It was all a big headache.

I think that helps explain Latin America – the US helped some sanguinary men because they promised to suppress communists, and when the USSR disappeared, the US just didn’t care all that much, which is why Daniel Ortega has been President of Nicaragua for a decade now, with nary a peep from Washington  – but Latin America’s a bit different because the US had been overthrowing Latin American governments for decades before the USSR showed up.

So what was all that about? I’m not as familiar with classic American Imperialism as I should be, but I suppose it was driven by an alliance between concentrated economic interests and American nationalists – the former to do the plotting, the later to do the voting and the shooting – with a different balance between the two according to the situation.

I know that some folks still think that individual capitalist interests still drive US foreign policy, but I’m unconvinced. That was all before America built up a real security state – the pack of suits that make up America’s ruling mind – when concentrated economic interests had more pull. Washington didn’t have the same Establishment back then. It didn’t even have a Pentagon. Now it’s Washington that does the plotting – America’s military-political Establishment – not the capitalists. No, they aren’t very good at it.

So if Washington isn’t doing the anti-communist thing, and it isn’t doing the capital-I Imperialist thing, what is it doing? 

Washington has a few perennial obsessions. Preventing Islamist terrorism; containing Russia, Iran, and China; preventing nuclear proliferation; managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting democracy movements. Those are all big projects. Washington picked them because it thought they were good fits for American values, interests, and capabilities.

Latin America is smaller than that. As best I can tell, US policy towards Latin America just doesn’t have the centrality it did in the Age of Imperialism or the Cold War. America’s Latin America problems are mundane. Controlling migration. Suppressing the drug trade. Preventing state failure. It’s not redemptive. It’s not heroic. It’s just a problem, and not an especially important one.

I’m sure the US is still ticking along doing sanguinary things in Latin America, but there are fewer people around convinced that those sanguinary things are actually heroic, there are fewer people to push for them and fewer people to sign up for the, and so Washington has fewer bold and stupid plots to work on. Fewer Oliver Norths, fewer Iran-Contras.

Now, that might change. The Establishment is opportunistic. If the situation on the ground is right, and Washington thinks it can do something – something redemptive, something heroic – it will jump. It’s wary, it’s chastened, but everyone wants redemption. Everyone wants to be the hero. We’re all just waiting for the right moment.

I thought egoists typically don’t care about desert, though?

I realized after I wrote this that I meant something different than ‘egoist’, but something I don’t have a word for. Haidt and Lukianoff tell me that most people believe in proportionality, a form of desert ethics that stresses effort:

Developmental psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom reviewed the research on fairness in children and concluded that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”

To be clear, sometimes distributive justice calls for equality. For example, Americans seem to have a common intuition that money inherited from a deceased parent should be divided equally among siblings, rather than trying to assess who did more for the parent or who needs the money more. And sometimes distributive justice calls for inequality; for example, when attending to need, particularly within a family or group that has some communal feeling and that thinks it fair and proper to route resources to whoever needs them most. But as the review by Starmans, Sheskin, and Bloom indicates, proportionality or merit is the most common and preferred principle children and adults use for allocating rewards outside a family.

Proportionality is the heart of “equity theory,” the major theory of distributive justice in social psychology. Its core assertion is that when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants, people perceive that to be equitable, or fair.

It is this and related ‘desert’ theories that I was addressing, rather than egoism specifically.

I confess that I know little about egoism. However, I do believe desert is common to both libertarian and conservative ethics. And when I see them advocate strict propertarianism or its corollaries, they generally imply that their ethics are justified by some form of desert.

I understand that you could frame this another way, and say that a traditionalist ‘moral economy’ satisfies equity theory and the propertarian ‘market economy’ does not. But in contemporary debates, the right has embraced desert more wholeheartedly than the center or the left.

So, what you're saying is mostly plausible, but there are congresspeople who room together in DC. Sometimes that sort of thing is about camraderie, not saving money.