CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10d ago
I'm not positive, but my impression is that this was a conscious turn by really important elite factions in the 80s, though. I don't believe it was "how politics was prior to the 2010s" - it was more like, what politics looked like once the Reagan detente offered up grill-pilling as an option for exhausted voters who were ready to move on from disruption and political struggle. No more fighting over politics - instead, America is great, nationalism is great, Wall Street is great, money and capitalism are great, religion and families are great, no more inflation is great, Hollywood images of peaceful race relations are great, local religious observances instead of national politics is great, Cosby Show instead of All in the Family is great. And especially, Boomers finally leaving their disruptive twenties and settling down to be stable and raise their families is great.
If you go back and read, say, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72" by Hunter S. Thompson, or "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough, or really anything about the rise of the New Left in the 70s, there is a whole lot of familiar archetypes, topics, and styles of rhetoric.
I guess at this point I'm coming to believe that breaking the brains of a certain amount of people is an overtly desirable feature, not bug, of certain kinds of political agitation. Making people unreasonable can actually be a really effective strategy for forcing certain kinds of change through, because then powerful leaders can't (by definition) reason with those people, and thus have to give in to demands instead or find some other way of dealing with them. I feel like that's what I've been seeing, at any rate - people who would naturally be somewhat unstable having that massively amplified by forces that appear to be attempting to accentuate exactly those tendencies for a variety of reasons.
I absolutely agree with your prescription about what would be better, I'm just not sure if there's a way to get there from here. I think there were a bunch of factors that made Reagan exactly the right affable messenger for that turn in the 80s for a turn away from politics of a certain sort.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10d ago
When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place. And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with. I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.
As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?) And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years. It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.
All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true. But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely. "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.
I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her). She started out quite conservatively religious. And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her. I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister. And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings. It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved. I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family. But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies... And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!
It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10d ago
Oh, totally. But I think I'm trying to get at something slightly different. To go with a slightly strained metaphor...
It's more like George W. Bush was a basketball team, everyone knew it and knew that the communal sport seemed to be basketball, and so the Democrats trained to play and beat a basketball team. And they arguably got really good at violating the spirit of basketball while staying in the letter of the rules of basketball (or so it seemed, if you were not sympathetic to Democrats).
And then they show up to play basketball, and Trump is there, announcing that the actual sport is boxing. And the refs angrily shake their heads no - we play basketball here! - and then Trump cheerfully gives them the finger and sells ticket to the upcoming boxing match, a giant crowd shows up for the boxing match, the crowd gets rowdy and ignores the refs, and then the refs shrug and the boxing match starts.
I think that's roughly what I'm getting at. Democrats couch it in moral language, but as you well note, it's extremely difficult to see how Trump (especially earlier Trump) was morally worse that Iraq War era George W. Bush. But it is easy to see that Democrats really liked the social, cultural terms of debate they had against the Mitt Romneys of the world, and they really don't like the terms of debate they have against Trump.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11d ago
Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.
I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts. And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump. But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.
And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners. The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners. And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model). And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests. And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.
But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition. It was badly weakened. And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.
And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction. And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney. That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool. But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing. I found it fascinating, to be honest.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11d ago
There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.
And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).
But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.
In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...
But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
You know, a while ago, I remember Matt Yglesias noticing that elected Republican officials (this was pre-Trump) were MUCH more sensitive to conservatives being called "racists" than they were to conservatives being "racist". He said it in a way that made it clear the thought he was being cute, of course.
But the observation has stuck with me, because it's actually fully general. And I think there actually really serious consequences.
To a first approximation (and I'm aiming here to use the no-no word to good effect), by the end of the 70s, the more radical side of liberals came out of the civil rights movement with a stance that was something like, "It is your own racist standards and worldview that make you think you can put certain people in the category of "nigger", and the word "nigger" exists to keep people down, and to the extent that there are people actually behaving in bad ways that might make you want to label them as "nigger", that's actually a result of pre-existing systemic racist forces that produce the "nigger" in the first place. All of this is a stain on you, not them. That word is your original sin."
And then, at about the same time, the Reagan coalition and Reagan detente settled on something like, "Obviously there are a whole bunch of people that it would be reasonable to call "nigger", clearly they are incompatible with civilization, but it's rude and unhelpful to use that explicit language about the topic, and much more to the point, there are a bunch of American black people who can be trusted to live up to high standards like the rest of us, we don't need to lower our standards, and it would be a grave injustice to treat those Americans as though they were just "niggers" who, by the way, totally exist, but we're just going to throw up our hands and corral those types in inner city ghettos and then massive prisons and turn our heads and avoid acknowledging it because, honestly, there really is nothing to be done, and we're more interested in integrating the more upstanding black citizens anyway, which is a much more happy project that we'd like to have our names attached to". Which is to say, the conservatives of that era might well have said, "You know what's much, much worse that calling someone "nigger"? It's choosing to be a civilization destroying "nigger", obviously, or choosing to coddle and elevate such people like liberals insist on doing. Incentives matter, and you're making sure you get a lot more of that". There's actually some interesting personal anecdote from Glenn Loury, talking about a private conversation he had with William F Buckley during the heyday of the Reagan administration in the mid 80s, and the summary of what Buckley had to say was very much in that ballpark - do what you can for the redeemable half, throw your hands up and move on for the other half.
And then Obama came along, and he and his movement (and the collapse of George W. Bush conservatism) destroyed the Reagan detente, and we've been living with that liberal story about racism every since. But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration. Despite all the word policing, the Emperors New Clothes is real, and I have to believe that anyone who has ever lived around a large enough variety of black people has some contact with some uniquely frustrating (or likely much, much worse) behavior. It's certainly been the case in every city I've ever lived in, and every good white liberal I know, if you can steer the conversation sensitively, will more or less acknowledge it and have their own stories, often said in sadness not anger. Just going off of basic human psychology, it would be the most natural thing in the world for lots of non-black people, given their actual life experiences, to hold significant grudges about black people in a tribal way. It really is, or I think it is, an act of civic virtue when someone says, "While all of that is obviously true, it is both wrong and unhelpful to tar other members of the larger group for the behavior of these particular people..." But that impulse really only works when you can follow that by saying "...because I know lots of people in this group both CAN and ARE living up to our high standards, and we are collectively capable of validating and affirming those high standards". Ever since the Obama years, this is no longer the narrative frame we exist in, I don't think.
I think this is why, at least for someone people, Chris Rock's old "Black People vs. Niggers" stand up bit feels so cathartic. Because the rules of the game, post-1980 was, you can behave as though you acknowledge those facts, you can vote with your feet and where you buy property, but you absolutely can't actually name those facts with your mouth. That was the trade off, the detente. And so hearing someone touch that nerve by actually naming it was electric at the time.
I've long expected that the Obama-era blowing up of those older norms, especially after a lot of the insane cancel culture language policing, was eventually going to force a deeper re-evaluation of these topics. In important ways, the Reagan-era settlement was a kind of social compromise between a bunch of different groups that had a lot of tension with each other, with different parties each getting half a loaf. The Obama era shift was not like that. I think it's always had a deep instability buried in its heart. A lot of groups didn't actually sign off on it, they just had it shoved down their throats while they were weak. And its norms (which have been unstable and have often been caught up in purity spirals) have proven to be simply way too far from reality to be stable, too.
All of this has been very much in the back of my mind as I watch the current kerfuffle about this crowdsourcing money stuff. I don't enjoy rudeness, but a lot of the progressive McCarthyism of the last 8 years or whatever has more or less guaranteed that we're going to see some new norms renegotiated, and it's bound to be messy and probably often unpleasant and shocking as it happens. But I don't think there's any switch we can hit that will just take us right back to 2008.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
This is the kind of post that makes so many good, and big, observations that it's hard to respond to usefully, almost.
But at any rate, I've grown to be really, really interested in this topic, specifically on an internal-to-the-USA level. And part of that is that I grew up in the New South in the 80s and 90s, and then I moved to the Midwest, got to know more of the country, and have ended up in a Rust Belt city now, where I'm raising kids. But I still have family down in the New South, so I'm down there fairly often, and (because I grew up there, but only some of my family was from there) I only briefly had a burst of hicklib anti-southern idiocy in my late 20s before reality caught up with me.
But the reality, right now, is that where I am now, it absolutely feels old and gray and like its best days are well behind it, because that is clearly true. The rustbelt part of the country I'm in clearly once had a lot of money, and youth, and immigration, and energy. And now it's like a donut - a small hole of well educated tech and medical workers, and a much larger donut of older, less skilled workers who are kind of decaying in place (in very broad strokes - there are random suburb and exurb professionals too). And that's been roughly true when visiting my family in the Northeast. But where I'm from in the New South is clearly going from strength to strength right now. There are still the general problems that new money has - it still punches under its weight in broader cultural projection and influence on the academy and literary cultural and all the sorts of things that old money tends to be heavily over represented in. But when I go back down to visit my family, there is a sense of confidence, like everything is working right, and most people's best days are ahead of them, not behind them. I mean, this is a huge part of what makes the New South the New South - the older South saw its best days as long, long behind them. Where I live now, the school district has had a stable population for decades and is really strong, but many neighboring districts, if they are less shiny, have been dwindling for a while now. Meanwhile, the county I grew up in in the New South had two high schools when I was there in the early 90s. Now it has 5.
I saw some article a few days ago mentioning that in 2030, at current rates, New South states (and intermountain West) will, combined, get 10 more house seats, and New York, California, and other older Midwest blue states will collectively lose 10 house seats. Or, elsewhere - and this, I think, might be the most important set of statistics in the country - if you look at the enrollment statistics for American public schools by region of the country from the Department of Education, you can literally see the future of the country being written. Fully 40% of American public school children are in the South at this point. Only 15% are in the North East, with the remainder being 20% in the Midwest and 24% in the West. That entire table is worth poring over, because it does capture the slow but steady shift of where people are having kids at this point - there are a lot of regional micro-stories there. As a practical matter, this means that the fact American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil, the local Hitler, probably has a limited shelf life - as the economic and demographic reality of the South rising again becomes more and more unavoidable, and as tolerance to "Hide your strength, bide your time" gets exhausted, there's probably just going to have to be a reckoning with this tension, or so I suspect, and the process might not be pretty. I'm convinced this is an important undercurrent of current politics, in fact - just as the economic, industrial rise of China has proven to be an existential problem in a Thucydides trap kind of way for the existing Yankee built system, the rise of the South is likely not a process that can be easily absorbed by the existing power arrangements because of some deep assumptions in those power structures about the moral role of the South, and the tensions between those assumptions and reality.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
I guess women don't know that you can't really see dicks of someone using a urinal unless you specifically look around their body to try to see it.
... Never, ever, ever underestimate the skeeviness and boldness of a certain subset of men, if they think they can get away with their exhibitionism or voyeurism fetishes while avoiding consequences. I've read elsewhere that many women are absolutely shocked by the brazenness of a subset of men sharing unsolicited dick pics quite freely online, too.
I think there might be a significant experiential gap here.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...
Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.
This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.
I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it. And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism. It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.
Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood. We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it. But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here - it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.
A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance. Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).
Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign. But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods. I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century. It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too. Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world. It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too. The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead". Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology. Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process). It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave. It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead. (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).
To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right. It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.
I think one of the things that's unusual about the pairing of Trump and Musk, at least for politicians, is the way that they're very intentionally brash and attention seeking.... and provocative, and, for Trump especially, fractious.
It seems to me that, in the normal course of things, activist parts of a coalition's base tend to be very noisy and confrontational, and then the more technocratic part of of a coalition, or the finance-oriented part of a coalition, tends to let that activist part suck up all the negative oxygen and emotion and then respond to in in the most anodyne, bloodless, quiet ways possible, generally making the really big changes. They tend to be more in the Politics and the English Language camp when it comes to attention management. And of course there is often more financial or organizational connections between the two parts of coalitions.
Trump and Musk seem like they're collapsing that distinction, which is... interesting.
Anyway, whether or not this way of behaving, this division of labor between funders/organizers/NGOs and the groups they fund, is shadowy is kind of a tricky issue, or so it seems to me. On the one hand, when I read, say, this Tablet story about the Pritzker family, their wealth, and the way they use it, and all the programs they fund, I could see the argument that none of what they're doing is secret; it's all in public, in some literal sense. That's what makes it possible to write that Tablet article, after all. And yet I also know that my fairly well-educated progressive in-laws, who live in Illinois and follow CNN and MSNBC, absolutely don't know any of this stuff, and it absolutely isn't worth the time trying to get them to know about it, because they have all sorts of ideological white blood cells about even the framing of topic. Same with the topics covered by Jacob Siegel in this article about the rise of the disinfo industry. Same with this famous Time magazine article. Same with all the discussion about the role and influence of USAID. Obama was famously very swayed by Cass Sunstein's theory of nudging groups, which is quite literally about recognizing problems with the attention that normies pay to things and then making policy that leverages those flaws (ostensibly towards pro-social ends). Is Moldbug's Cathedral shadowy? Or is it just normal and inevitable, the reality of complicated modern states dealing with the cognitive realities of their "citizens"?
I feel like this is a major fault line right now. Over and over, one set of people is inclined to say, I think, "Everything is legal and above the board, and this is just what our system literally IS. This kind of technocratic organizing is simple how power works, and how it must inevitably work." And another side says, "Even if it's ostensibly legal, there are so many layers of indirection, and so much rhetorical obfuscation, and so much artful shifting of attention, that surely the goal is not democratic deliberation and self-governance. TPOSIWID." Much like with the USAID stories, whether or not these different organizations or funders or whoever else is shadowy, large blocks of voters sure seem to respond like the organizations have been shadowy when those voters finally realize what the organizations have been up to...
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
You might also be interested in George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief", Thomas Leonard's "Illiberal Reformers", and Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", all of which also cover this same era and dig into some overlapping topics and themes.
I've been trying to understand the shift from the worldview of the progressive era (where a lot of our inherited institutions were built and cemented) to... well, whatever emerged in the 60s and 70s, and all of these books were really useful for me in that regard. Leonard's book was a bit dry, but lots of great information. The other two read pretty easily, IIRC.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I wonder if there's not an alternative way of framing all of this, not as "should we have accountability" but rather, "must accountability be externally legible, and what are the costs and consequences if it must?"
As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other.
When my wife got her PhD, it was a long, grueling, intensive process. In particular, though, it was expensive in the sense that she had a world class expert in her field who paid quite a lot of attention to her during that multiyear process (she fortunately had a good and ethical advisor). And you can see (if this is working correctly) the outlines of an older system of accountability; in theory, my wife went through an intensive acculturation process by an existing cohort of experts who could, by the end of the process, vouch that my wife had internalized values and norms that meant she could be trusted by the broader cohort of researchers in her field, and thus ought to be able to independently drive a research program. That doesn't mean there's not also lots of peer review and criticism and whatever else, of course, just that she went through a process that, if it worked correctly, meant she should have an internal mechanism of accountability that meant she could be trusted, in general. All of this is much, much clearer in action if you look at universities operating many decades ago, when they had much less money, much less bureaucracy, and generally much more independence.
But clearly the current version of the University is flooded with extra deans, and administrators, and IRB reports, and massive amounts of paperwork, and giant endowments that are lawfare targets, and many layers of bureaucracy, and a bunch of arguably screwed up personal values from cultural evolution the last few decades. And many of those changes are intended to keep everyone in line and make sure everything is legible to the broader system. And so, in those spaces, the older model of producing virtuous professionals who can work cheaply by their own guidance is frequently superseded by this other "trustless society" model. And everything is slow, and expensive, and the values of the bureaucracy is often at odds with getting good work done, for all the reasons discussed in the linked conversation.
Or, to use another example, I've seen this claim made, by certain irritated black activists connected to screwed up urban neighborhoods, that there's just as much crime going on out in the white suburbs, but the cops are racist and just don't enforce laws out there. Which honestly, the first time I read that, was generally just kind of shocking and equal parts hilarious and depressing. Because of course, the entire point of going to a good suburb is that a critical mass of people have internalized an illegible, internal sense of accountability that means they mostly don't actually need cops around all that often. And everyone around them knows that about them, and about themselves. That's literally why certain people find them kind of stifling. (Obviously there are things that happen in suburbs like weed smoking or domestic abuse or whatever. But obviously we're talking about questions of degree here) Meanwhile, in distressed neighborhoods, you simply have to have cops and a legible system because a critical mass of people do not internalize that sense of accountability, and so you need the external accountability of the legible state.
Anyone who has worked in an effective small startup, versus a giant profitable corporation has almost certainly run into these same divides, I suspect.
Getting back to the question of government in this context, a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy", which was a great book, as well as C. S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man". And they were a really nice pairing to capture some of these big questions, about whether a society needs to produce leaders who have an internal sense of morality and virtue, who try to do the right thing at any given moment based on an internally cultivated sense of accountability, versus the transition to a world where accountability is an external, entirely legible thing where independent judgement and virtue can't be relied on and instead bureaucracy and technocracy solve all problems (like, say, the way that Uber driver reviews might, as just one simple example). And I think you can find upsides and downsides to each approach.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs.
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away.
I feel like all these issues are always multi-causal and overdetermined. To make a comparison, it seems clear to me that since the rise of Obama, there were a bunch of really powerful forces that decided they were interested in using the wedge of "spreading LGBTQ+ rights" as a pretext to push more American power and influence into lots of other countries. Or the cause of black Civil Rights in the aftermath of World War 2 gave much wealthier, more powerful Northern interests a pretext to push for massive development in the American South, fundamentally altering its character (in many cases against the will of many interests that were locally powerful but weak compared to Northern money and social power). In each case, there were obviously lots of true believers, but there were also powerful triangulators who massively amplified these narratives in the public because they could be used to pursue other goals they considered important.
I'm not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist, but I have this sense that there are very big, very powerful, very important forces - non-partisans ones - that are less noisy and fractious and attention-seeking than Trump + friends, who have come to see the giant gamble starting in the late 90s of integrating China into the world economic system as a world-historical gamble that has proven to be an existential mistake, at least on the terms that it has evolved. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get that sense. And so there needs to be some public, noisy, easy-to-understand narrative to walk parts of that back, and to rebuild America's military, and to get normie young men to identify with defending a homeland and to start families and to raise kids, and to convince Europeans that they need to defend themselves and to regain something like an internal sense of nationalism (which being pissed off at Americans might ironically inflame and facilitate, as seems to be happening in Canada) and a willingness to actually make material sacrifices to make that all possible. There needs to be something like the 1980s again, basically, in much of the West. If you ignore belief in universal principles and stick with realpolitiks, globalism seemed unambiguously useful to many powerful American interests in 1998, and now we've reached a point where, at least for certain aspects of it, that's not so clear. If you go along with this argument, local automation absolutely isn't a threat to these powers that be - in fact, it's crucial. Chinese manufacturing broadly (specifically where they can piggyback from it to engage in a massive military buildup that leverages it) absolutely has evolved to be a threat to such powers. And if you're onboard with this theory, you would expect the public narratives that get the most oxygen to be the ones that are most aligned with reorganizing America's global system to protect against a rising China, rather than ones that, say, take automation seriously.
I'm not saying that makes true believers in manufacturing=jobs fake or anything, any more than people for whom Civil Rights occupied a sacralized moral status were fake. That stuff is out there and it is real. The existence of decaying parts of the Rust Belt is real. Many families cultural memory of the role that well-payed manufacturing jobs played in buoying their communities and giving them a sense of pride are real. People with those concerns are always out there. But the question of why it's getting so much oxygen now, why the megaphones are amplifying the narratives they are, is a different story, or so it seems to me. That's my speculation, anyway.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
How do we get the trust back?
I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.
It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.
I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly. And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too. They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be. At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.
I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at. It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren). But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing. And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust. This stuff isn't magic. But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.
Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine. There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I think it just comes down to costs
I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.
From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character
"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."
The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal). Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”" I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point. But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well. Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in. (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).
I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything. Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems. It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.
The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union. And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that. But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it. That was the Soviet bureaucracy. And that is the Cathedral as well. And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And here we are.
To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping. It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course. And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm. For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.
I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere. And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.
Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I don't mean China as the people of China, here, or their material conditions. I mean China as the political entity run by the CCP. And by "rotted out from within", I meant the CCP having their sovereignty dissolved and capacity to act undermined... which is very clearly what liberalization is supposed to do to political regimes. I've seen this discussed at great length by western political intellectuals in the past; this isn't some kind of giant secret. Globalization and integrating China into the global economic order was supposed to weaken their government and dissolve the insularity of Chinese culture.
My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.
Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
Imagine it was 1984, and you were an ethnic Latvian, living in what would later be Latvia, and you were well aware of the impact Moscow had on the cultural formation of your children and surrounding community. And then an ethnic Russia, mid conversation one day, brought out some spread sheets to show off how efficiently the Soviet Ministry of Education was being run, and thus anyone who had any problems with the system was misinformed by fake news. You would probably recognize that there was a crucial gap between the actual, deep issues and the argument being presented.
My entire life, since my childhood in the 80s, all the conservatives I know had had dismantling the federal department of education right up there with ending Roe vs. Wade. There was never a time when the adults in my life didn't despise that Department as an organ of cultural domination and social engineering. It was on the same level for the kinds of conservatives I knew as Universal Health Care or Real Gun Control or First Female President is for liberals.
This is absolutely straight up who/whom stuff.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
3mo ago
I don't know if he is on the path to leaving, but I want to pull on what seems like the subtext here: is it the case that a large subset of Americans overtly identifying their national identity with historical European Christianity bad for the Jews, like Ben Shapiro? Right? Like, I assume that you are suggesting that Walsh taking this stance puts him at odds with the owners of Daily Wire.
I want to put it this way, because I think that topic is itself interesting and non-obvious. If you look at the original neocons, a LOT of them were Jewish (and many former trotskyites), and, in the 80s, a lot of them seemed to think that some version of very pro-Israel evangelical Christianity in America as the default public religion, as long as certain kinds of separation of church and state were followed and anti-semitism was still heavily stigmatized, was, in fact, Good For The Jews (tm). I read the interesting book "The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy" by Murray Friedman not too long ago, and it takes up exactly this topic. And in particular, some of those thinkers might well have come to see an ideology of secular, leftist third worldism (especially after the 7 days war) as Bad for the Jews, and a default European evangelical Christianity as a bulwark against that, given the deep chasms between that form of Christianity and secular, leftist third worldism, as well as that strain of Christianity instilling certain kind of salutary personal moral discipline in citizens anyway. And certainly we are seeing a repeat of history with the current leftwing Israel-is-Genociding-Palestinians stuff, the deeper internal Black-vs-Jew power fight within the Democratic party, and the response of some American Jews to all that.
If you go down this road, I think it raises a bunch of other, bigger, interesting questions. Recoiling against antisemitism is, itself, rooted in certain Christian-derived values (Tom Holland's Dominion is a really strong book on a lot of these ideas). Is the rise of China and its ability to avoid being rotted out from within by Western liberalism and capitalism, China with its internal culture that is unabashed racialist in a way that late 19th century would find recognizable... is that rise Good for the Jews? Would a world run by the current culture of China be hospitable to Jewish people and Jewish power?
I'm reminded of an observation that Glenn Loury has made. He made the point that it wasn't at all obvious that it was in the best interest for African American descendants of slaves for America to be flooded by immigrants. And his point was that, while there was this naive belief that everyone would team up against White-y, over in reality, because of the Civil Rights movement, American blacks could make a certain kind of moral claim on other white Americans whose ancestors have been here for a while. "I'm not so doing well, but your ancestor enslaved me." But it seems deeply unlikely that newer immigrants from East Asia or South Asia, as they gain power, are likely to be moved by such claims. Far more like is for them to see the deep pathologies of black communities not through a lens of guilt, but rather through a lens of disgust.
Obvious Jewish people aren't a monolith, and there are more Jewish opinions than there are Jewish people. But, in America, for a bunch of reasons, the concerns of powerful Jewish people do matter a huge amount. And I think it is the case that there are probably versions of "America was founded as a white Christian nation" that some such people could find useful and tolerable, and there are some such versions that aren't. I'm not sure where Walsh's current views fit on that front (and, of course, Catholicism is it's own deeply interesting, deeply complicated topic here too, for that matter).
CrispyFriedBarnacles
3mo ago
Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.
Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?
I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.
One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."
But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.
As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.
Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush. It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially. And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources. I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened. And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.
But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about. That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother". It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma. In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over. You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too. If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.
So there's that. And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture. And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable. And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008. Fool me once, shame on me...
And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.
I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space. If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization. But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting. Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.
So, to return to your original question, why bother? Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways. And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again. You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically. And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way. I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on. But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".
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