Intellectual respectability for psychopaths

I came into a fair amount of contact with the Stanford University campus and its students while driving cab in Palo Alto—this, on a weekly lease, was a way to keep myself in a vehicle while I was finishing my B.A. in Mass Communication at California State University, East Bay, in Hayward, across the Bay, and commuting over forty miles each way from the Santa Cruz Mountains in the South Bay. Palo Alto, you should know, is a very liberal, albeit very wealthy, area with pretensions to being progressive; the population there will largely be entirely comfortable with Barack Obama’s legacy and Joe Biden’s presidency.

But on the Stanford University campus, there also exists the Hoover Institute, which always seemed odd to me. It is very conservative as one might suspect from the president it draws its name from, Herbert Hoover, who was unlucky enough to preside over the stock market collapse in 1929 and the ensuing economic collapse of the Great Depression. Capitalist libertarians think Hoover was, if anything, too “liberal,” that is, too “liberal” in the sense of his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought us the New Deal, too ready to intervene in the economy.

In that vein, we might note that some corporate leaders, whose ideology I do not distinguish from capitalist libertarianism, saw Roosevelt’s attempt to save capitalism from itself as an assault on private property and attempted to organize a coup against him.[1] This is a line of thinking that has relentlessly and vigorously resisted New Deal reforms ever since,[2] and brought us neoliberalism.[3]

If conservatives, especially neoconservatives and capitalist libertarians, are psychopaths, those at the Hoover Institute are among the highly educated sort, and all the more dangerous.

So now, it seems, some at the Hoover Institute have been championing “herd immunity”[4] of the kind that would not be achieved through a vaccine, but rather, and as it turns out, probably would not be achieved through mass novel coronavirus contagion, overwhelmed health care facilities, and mass lethality in the COVID-19 pandemic.[5] But of course, this approach has an obvious appeal for those anxious to offer human sacrifices to the capitalist god.[6] And so, as I would expect, some faculty at Stanford object and some are advocating that Stanford sever ties with the Institute. The university administration is stonewalling the idea but the professors are still trying.[7]

This is a story to watch because it shows how academia may be complicit even in utterly discredited ideas (like neoliberalism[8]), lending them the aura of intellectual respectability, even as it is apparent that the advocates of these ideas are intellectually dishonest psychopaths. Yeah, Condoleezza Rice, former Stanford University provost, continuing Stanford faculty member, new Hoover Institute director, and former secretary of state under George W. Bush, I’m looking at you.

  1. [1]George Seldes, 1000 Americans: The Real Rulers of the U.S.A. (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948; Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive, 2009).
  2. [2]Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Crown, 1970).
  3. [3]Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2013); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2012); see also David Benfell, “Saving capitalism from itself. Again,” Not Housebroken, August 21, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/08/21/saving-capitalism-from-itself-again/
  4. [4]Tom Bartlett, “Why Some Stanford Professors Want the Hoover Institution Gone,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-some-stanford-professors-want-the-hoover-institution-gone
  5. [5]D. Clay Ackerly, “My patient caught Covid-19 twice. So long to herd immunity hopes,” Vox, July 12, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twice-reinfection-antibody-herd-immunity; Tom McCarthy, “‘The virus doesn’t care about excuses’: US faces terrifying autumn as Covid-19 surges,” Guardian, July 18, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/18/us-coronavirus-fall-second-wave-autumn; Yascha Mounk, “This Is Just the Beginning,” Atlantic, March 25, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/national-shutdown-least-bad-option/608683/; Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eileen Sullivan, “As Trump Pushes to Reopen, Government Sees Virus Toll Nearly Doubling,” New York Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-death-toll.html; David Wallace-Wells, “We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic,” New York, April 17, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/we-are-probably-only-a-tenth-of-the-way-through-the-pandemic.html; David Wallace-Wells, “There Is Still No Plan,” New York, May 7, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/white-house-plan-for-ending-coronavirus-stay-at-home-orders.html; Ed Yong, “How the Pandemic Will End,” Atlantic, March 25, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/
  6. [6]David Benfell, “The capitalist death cult,” Not Housebroken, March 27, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/03/27/the-capitalist-death-cult/; David Benfell, “An impatient capitalist god demands human sacrifice. Now,” Not Housebroken, April 17, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/04/15/an-impatient-capitalist-god-demands-human-sacrifice-now/; David Benfell, “Surprise! Surprise! The capitalist god is greedy!” Not Housebroken, May 25, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/05/23/surprise-surprise-the-capitalist-god-is-greedy/
  7. [7]Tom Bartlett, “Why Some Stanford Professors Want the Hoover Institution Gone,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-some-stanford-professors-want-the-hoover-institution-gone
  8. [8]Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2013); David Fickling, “The Gig Economy Compromised Our Immune System,” Yahoo!, July 25, 2020, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gig-economy-compromised-immune-system-000048670.html; Amir Fleischmann, “The Myth of the Fiscal Conservative,” Jacobin, March 5, 2017, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/03/fiscal-conservative-social-services-austerity-save-money; Jason Hickel, “Progress and its discontents,” New Internationalist, August 7, 2019, https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2012); Robert Kuttner, “Austerity never works: Deficit hawks are amoral — and wrong,” Salon, May 5, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/05/05/austerity_never_works_deficit_hawks_are_amoral_and_wrong/; Dennis Loo, Globalization and the Demolition of Society (Glendale, CA: Larkmead, 2011); Thomas Piketty, Jeffrey Sachs, Heiner Flassbeck, Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis, “Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter From Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel,” Nation, July 6, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/austerity-has-failed-an-open-letter-from-thomas-piketty-to-angela-merkel/; John Quiggin, “Austerity Has Been Tested, and It Failed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 20, 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/Austerity-Has-Been-Tested-and/139255/; David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, “How Austerity Kills,” New York Times, May 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/opinion/how-austerity-kills.html; David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, “Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills,” Salon, May 19, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/paul_krugmans_right_austerity_kills/

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