Plighting their troth

Some right-leaning figures go the whole hog

Via.

You probably remember Megan McArdle’s Grenfell Tower column from 2017 (subtitled “Perhaps safety rules could have saved some residents. But at what cost to others’ lives? There’s always a trade-off”). Many people do! I find it’s like Rod Dreher’s Friend with the Wife who had an Exorcism posts — lots of people who aren’t aware of the full scope of Dreher’s awfulness will hear his name and go, “Oh, he’s that exorcism dude!” (Though his obsession with children’s shows that have trans characters may be changing that.)

So, too, that column where McArdle brushed off a horrible fire in a public housing tower, caused or made worse by government negligence, by asking the reader if it was really worth the effort of trying to keep paupers from being burned alive if it created an inconvenience for the rest of society (i.e., people like her). Ah yes, I remember it well — especially when she tried to make her point with speed limits:

In the U.S., tens of thousands of people were killed in auto accidents last year. We could probably eliminate most of those deaths if we simply made sure that no one ever piloted their personal vehicle above some prudent speed -- say, 25 mph -- which would reduce both the likelihood of crashes occurring, and the damage any crashes would do.

Are you willing to make that trade-off? To avert 40,000 deaths, all you have to do is move closer to work, take public transportation (where available), or spend a lot more time in the car…

Americans have made that choice: Nope, not worth it. We are manifestly not willing to exchange personal convenience for lower auto fatalities…

When the cost is as personal, as glaring and obvious, as restricting every car to a snail’s pace, we can see that not all safety trade-offs are worth it. However, when the cost seems to be borne by someone else, we suddenly become safety absolutists: no price is too great to pay…

And that’s why liberals were all crying “why weren’t there sprinklers and fireproofing” — they never do the cost-benefit analysis or measure the trade-offs, whereas McArdle had, and saw that a bunch of welfare cases just weren’t worth it.

I was reminded of this yesterday by Glenn Greenwald’s attempt to bothsides the respective COVID responses of, on the one side, people who want to stop the spread of the disease (which, you may have heard, is running riot again) by getting people vaccinated and requiring masks in (and, where appropriate, delaying the opening of) schools — which, given the many, many U.S. schools now in quarantine, seems reasonable — and, on the other side, people who have suffered from “the devastating results” of “two years of school closures” (which Greenwald apparently blames on public health officials rather than the virus) and thus need to throw open the schoolhouse gates, pandemic or no pandemic, and let the chips fall where they may.

Actually Greenwald is not quite bothsidesing here, because clearly he thinks the latter folks have the superior argument, because they and their kids are really suffering, and the damned liberals are too selfish to see it because they’re childless freaks — no, really, read the part where Greenwald suggests “rapidly declining rates of child-rearing in the West make it more difficult to observe or care about the damage all of this is doing to the developmental abilities and mental health of children” — it’s like something out of a natalist pamphlet or a J.D. Vance campaign speech.

Weirder still is when Greenwald says the anti-COVID “absolutists” haven’t actually run the “cost-benefit analysis” of their efforts, which is why their priorities are all screwed up, and to clarify he uses the example of… speed limits:

The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph….

Given how many deaths and serious injuries would be prevented, why is nobody clamoring for a ban on cars, or at least severe restrictions on who can drive (essential purposes only) or how fast (25 mph)?...

…in general, the reason is much simpler and less sinister. It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths…

I’d call it plagiarism, except it’s not a crime to take something out of someone else’s garbage.

Now, Greenwald and McArdle are libertarians so they’re both going to tend toward “let’s get out the slide rule” whenever somebody calls for shared public action. But I think Greenwald echoes McArdle’s argument for another reason, and it isn’t laziness.

The Afghanistan withdrawal has been a bonanza for rightwing propagandists. The prestige press has been describing the withdrawal as a catastrophe, notwithstanding it’s actually been orderly and impressive. For wingnuts this is like the classic “Eventheliberal New Republic” situation — the bit where some allegedly liberal press organ agrees with them, and they take it for universal consensus — but multiplied a hundredfold. (Hilariously, National Review’s Rich “We’re Winning” Lowry calls this “The Media’s Finest Hour.”) Several wingnuts have demanded Biden resign or be impeached, and all predict utter ruination for the Democrats in 2022 if not sooner.

Orgiastic intervals such as this tend to shake up the media environment — recall the explosion of rightwing bloggers during the previous war-fever years of the Early ‘00s, when everyone was juiced to start wars instead of outraged that one is ending — and no doubt there are fresh opportunities now for ambitious journalists to step up.

With his guest appearances on Tucker Carlson and his belligerent tweets, Greenwald was already warming up the rightwing audience, but only as a crossover figure — more of an exotic John Connolly/Zell Miller the-left-left-me type than a true believer. Now that the iron’s hot, it’s a good moment for someone like him to make his bones with a dramatic gesture, doing something really conservative — and what could be more conservative than claiming liberals are making too much out of this COVID thing and that people who send their unmasked kids into crowded classrooms are the real smart guys? Hell, now maybe Greenwald will get his own Fox News show!

And he’s not the only one. Matt Taibbi’s been wingnut-friendly for a while, but yesterday he did a column about how antifa allegedly beat up a journalist in Portland. In his astonishing column he minimizes the contributions of the Proud Boys and other rightwing goons who’ve been coming to these protests with weapons and escalating the threat environment; sure, he admits, “a right-wing protester fired first” at the protest (and was arrested) but “a Black Bloc protester returned fire but was not apprehended” (the cops claim, and Taibbi takes on faith). And he goes on about how stupid Democrats defend black bloc (“Jerrold Nadler calling Antifa violence a ‘myth’”) and how mad he is at the “ethics of mainstream press outlets that they let behavior like this go without comment” (which is simply not true).

Taibbi’s obviously made a calculation that there’s room on the scene for more than one Andy Ngo, and he’s not gonna sleep on it!

This is, as Ronald Reagan used to say, a time for choosing — and whatever else sucks about it, it at least has the advantage of clarity.