Early Access: Always a Bigger Fish

I typically stop short of saying it is the "goal," exactly, since that's rarely true except for out-and-out white supremacists. It is more a state of affairs that benefits them and that they're OK with, and that they reflexively resist policies that would create a different situation. As I've said elsewhere, they are *very good* at being ignorant of their own beliefs.

Ian Danskin

Hmm, okay. So conservatives are all about sending a message to illegal immigrants; not necessarily "You are not welcome here", but rather "If you come here you have no rights and will serve at the bottom of the hierarchy". This would maybe help explain the "build the wall" policy stance. Liberals have been saying since it was first suggested that a wall is completely ineffective, since most immigrants arrive legally and overstay their visas. Conservatives have never bothered to argue otherwise, which I always thought was odd. However, if the goal of immigration policy is not to end immigration, but to facilitate the creation of a societal underclass of minnows, then the wall serves much the same purpose as all the statues of Confederate generals; it's a monument, a symbol of racist capitalist oppression with a veneer of deniability. Spending however many billions of dollars on a wall would then make spending a handful more millions of dollars on ICE crackdowns more socially palatable, creating the culture of fear that ensures the hierarchy is maintained.

Thanks very much! But, no, I don't think so. That's labor I don't have time for right now.

Ian Danskin

Joe is correct that it means introducing more competition. But, also, understand that conservative lawmaking is rarely about stopping things from happening: abortion laws are not about preventing abortion, the drug war isn't about stopping the use of drugs. They don't want to stop crime, they want to PUNISH crime. I suspect the same goes for immigration. They don't anticipate that we will ever stop there from being illegal immigrants doing menial labor for very little money. But they want to make sure those people can only do low-paying, undocumented labor or risk getting deported. To a conservative, laws are about the government saying what is and isn't good behavior, and they want to make sure THEY are always codified as the virtuous ones.

Ian Danskin

A given conservative might not be at the top of the pyramid, but they’re sure that the cozy middle slice they inhabit is rightfully theirs. God given even. An immigrant might come in and “take our jobs”, or essentially unseat the conservative from their cozy middle slice of the pyramid, or “be a drain on the system” and limit the profits trickling up the pyramid to the conservative. Worse yet, what if the immigrants start to build their own “El Castillo”, and start taking bricks from your pyramid to do so? It’s flawed logic, but that’s the logic they use.

Ian, I REALLY, REALLY, like the preview for the new video for "Always a Bigger Fish." I realize that most conservatives are going to dismiss anything you have to say out of hand. However, this is the kind of video that I'd like to get their opinions on. Is there any chance of putting together a slightly edited version that doesn't outright say that conservatives are misinformed or delusional?

Adam Reuter

I had a lot more difficulty following the thought process of The Card Says Moops compared to your previous work. That could have been because the content was difficult to articulate. This piece does not have that issue.

Adam Reuter

Question. If conservatives are all about the capitalist hierarchy, then why are they anti-immigration? It makes sense for liberals to be pro-immigration because immigrants are people too and deserving of the same inalienable rights as all of us. It makes sense for fascists to be anti-immigration because "they" aren't "us" and don't deserve what "we" have. But if capitalism is about the rich benefiting at the expense of the poor, then wouldn't introducing a significant number of poor, desperate people to a country be a good thing for those at the top? Is this just one of those cases where fascist thought has infiltrated conservative thought, or is there a legit reason why conservatives would want to seal the borders?

9:56 there's a typo, the word "and" instead of the word "an"

kendall

Loved the video. I’d say my only note is that, around 15:08, you go straight from “conservatives are afraid of being pushed down the hierarchy” to “race plays a factor” without a good transition sentence between those points. The points you make are fine, but a better transition than “Also...” might make the essay flow better.

Bradley Ogilvie

may have already caught this but at 1:34 the second line of text has two "then"s

boringcactus

"git gud" haha!

Allan Anderson

Thanks for another amazing video! You put into words all the things that I experience as frustrating feelings. In this one your friend must be a very nice conservative, because the conservatives I know live in the pyramid world simply because they want to feel better than. They can't imagine the equal linear world not because it doesn't seem real, but because of this deep seated need to just have someone beneath them in a hierarchy. So they allow that someone will be above them, like you say, but the ones I know do it because they are desperate to know they themselves are above others. It's an ego thing. A superiority complex. They detest equality not because they don't think it can exist but because they couldn't stand it if it did. I don't talk to my conservative friends either these days lol

Gingerpuffs

Religion was certainly part of Reagan's "three-legged stool" coalition of conservatism: Capitalism, Religion and Militarism. However, neither the capitalists nor some of the militarists are particularly religious (Chair force aside) and modern alt-right cons aren't particularly religious either (or are pagan, as Ian mentioned).

Pavel A

Fair enough. I just know locally it's pretty decent pay, but I live in a fairly low cost of living area and around here they make $13-15 an hour. A single person can live fairly comfortably on $10 per hour, if they don't want to save much money (or have fun too often). It certainly isn't making billionaires anytime soon, but no labor can do that realistically- it always requires investment in someone else's labor to get to that stage.

Supererogatory = moral extra credit

"Crap" was maybe a strong word, and that passage has been rewritten already. $16 an hour is less than living wage in many cities, though, and when we're speaking in the context of "what kind of work leads to becoming a billionaire," ALL menial labor pays crap.

Ian Danskin

Modern reactionary conservatism has an atheist streak, and a surprising preponderance of, like, Odinism and neo-paganism. So I've been trying to focus on the ideologies that unite all these fellow travelers. I feel very under-equipped to talk about religion, though I might if it feels necessary.

Ian Danskin

I think the religion and faith part play into the “natural order of things” aspect. Which is probably why so many conservatives are able to accept the hierarchy as natural. Religion reinforces what is natural, faith reinforces that what is natural is not to be questioned.

I have to say, all the recent videos in this series, in the first two minutes I’m in a place of not understanding the concept, but by the end it all comes together for me. This seems rather obvious for an essay, but compared to a lot of video essays on YouTube, in which I grasp the main point of the video within the first thirty seconds, it’s incredibly refreshing.

Garbage men make pretty decent pay. Nothing great (median pay is about $16 per hour), but I wouldn't call it crap pay.

Supererogatory = moral extra credit

yeah i started to watch this Video and thought: this Explanation of conservatism makes a lot of sence and also it realy underlines the arguement that fascism is just revolutionary conservatism and then you went right into that direction. Good job

Sascha Moros

Hi, can you put your PhD hat on for a minute and point me in the correct direction for "welfare economics, general equilibrium and capital markets"? Specifically, I have a masters in math and studied Micro and Macro online thanks to the MIT courses, and I have noticed quite a few problems with the discipline as it is being taught to undergrads - specifically from a mathematical point of view, which is my area of expertise. However, I believe the general consensus is that things get ironed out "later on" in the studies; where that "later on" is, I can't tell, I don't know how to find good material without going through a million courses, and I'm not really looking to take another degree in my free time if I can avoid it. I guess what I'm asking is, what would you recommend as good books, courses or resources to better understand the way capitalism and markets work? I can work out the prerequisites later, if there are any, and backfill preparation as needed, but I'd like a general map of the discipline because right now I'm lost.

Manfredi

Great video! It's a really useful framework to think things through. It does feel really weird to talk about the conservative mindset and never talk about religious faith, though. I'm not sure there's room for it in this video, but I really hope you talk about that at some point in this series.

Byron Callan

The sharks are just a bunch of minnows animating a shark-suit, right down to the flexible teeth. So, uh, death to hierarchies, I guess. Good video, though.

a wingless monkey

Great discussion of the conservative worldview. There's one, at least for me, frustrating part. Your "in the abstract" description of capitalism (of the free market variety we're generally familiar with) may be what conservatives believe capitalism to be, but it's juxtaposed with a description of democracy as a theoretical ideal. The whole "big fish get to eat little fish" may indeed be the way conservatives think the world should work, and perhaps those same people would tell you that that's the theory too, but they'd also tell you that the USSR in reality was how socialism is *supposed* to work in theory, and that's trash. I'm not gonna put on my PhD hat and give you an intro to welfare economics, general equilibrium, or capital markets, so instead I'll say I think this video would be stronger if you made it clear that you're describing capitalism as conservatives (and plenty of leftists, it seems) believe it to be.

This is great, like the rest of the series.

Fantastic video. You’re one of the best modern political writers I’ve found.

Alice

Just a drive by to say thanks again for this series. It's very genuinely my go-to teaching tool.

Sata Prescott

Comparing Conservative reasoning to Kingdom Hearts lore is a strike of pure genius

Snapping Snapper

"Some slides reflected changes I've made to the script, so you don't need to point out discrepancies!" <3

Ian Danskin

Definitely a feature. Many conservatives believe that without the hope that one day you'll be able to point and laugh at all the poor saps who didn't make it, no one would ever work hard.

David Harkness

And at 17:18 the words said don't appear in the order with which they're said: "undemocratic, hierarchical..."

Having never played any of the Kingdom Hearts series, the "Mickey with his shirt off" metaphor kinda lost me. Other than that, this is fabulous. I guess I had been operating under the assumption that conservatives were unaware of the fact that unregulated capitalism leads to social inequality. But it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Typo at 10' "and underclass" should be "an underclass." Love your stuff!

We're all just gonna keep slipping Jordan Peterson jokes into things from now until the end, huh? Good

It's finally here! 😁 Time to watch it three times in a row.

Christopher Stoll