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Konkvistador comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - Less Wrong
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The article is interesting for how badly it misrepresents American history. Intellectual elitist dominance of US policy is a frequently debated topic throughout the history of the United States. Moldbug is right that certain views flowed from academia to public consciousness. But he ignores a lot of other causal factors.
Regarding US race relations, Moldbug ignores that (1) the trend towards pro-civil rights court rulings predates California's Proposition 14 by at least 40 years in cases like Buchanan v. Warley (1917) and Missouri exrel. Gaines (1938) and (2) the prime mover of US political opinion was probably public unwillingness to support the methods of Bull Connor.
Regarding the political tilt of academia, Moldbug ignores the conservative movement's recent success in creating an academic movement that lead to the appointment of conservative judges who have dramatically rolled back US constitutional and statutory interpretation from the more liberal positions of the Warren Court.
Finally, the disparate treatment of unjust tyrants like Castro and Pinochet in academia (1) ignores the different treatment of those regimes by the US government, and (2) partially reflects a feeling of guilt that the US was involved in establishing conservative regimes by taking actions like supporting the coup against Allende or the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and creation of the Mobutu regime. By contrast, there was relatively little US support for the creation of the Castro regime, and thus less culpability for the injustices that followed.
In short, Moldbug's history is incredibly selective - making it impossible to take seriously any of the conclusions he draws from his historical analysis.
That you tout this as a grand example of right wing victory is somewhat surprising, it in my eyes weakens your case considerably for it is a feeble thing compared to the vast cultural shift leftward in the past decades and centuries.
As far as I can tell, Moldbug's thesis is:
My points were (paragraph by paragraph):
- academic pressure doesn't explain the civil rights movement in the US
- academia is not immune to right-wing ideas
- the evidence that academia is leftist is explainable by other factors beyond ideological bias (with a side helping of policy-makers don't seem as leftist as their professors)
In short, that makes the second sentence of Moldbug's thesis not likely enough for further consideration. I leave it to you to judge whether the first sentence stands without the second. But Moldbug doesn't seem to think so - otherwise, why waste all that energy citing that particular historical evidence at all?
As an aside, if one's political theory really can't distinguish between the victorious community organizer and the defeated business executive, then my evidence is entitled to substantially less weight. But that isn't the consensus usage in the doctrines of history or political science dating back to before the rise of PC concerns (but after the Glorious Revolution - so Moldbug may not care). Further, I assert political theories that can't tell the difference (e.g. political Marxism as practiced) are insufficiently nuanced to be capable of making useful predictions.