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Okay, but I think that bad events make things worse, too. If you are claiming populism is making things worse (which I have some directional sympathy for), it's fair to ask what bad events it is responsible for. Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Which is part of why a "top ten bad things since 1990" list could be instructive.
The reason I wanted to flag the bipartisaness of the decisions was because you claimed that evaluating those sorts of decisions was likely to get dragged down into partisan bickering. I don't really see it. Do Republicans get mad if you say "yeah I think you know we should have deported the 9/11 hijackers before they flew into the World Trade Center?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Republicans. Do Democrats get mad if you say "yeah I think Clinton shouldn't have deregulated the banking industry?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Democrats.
Certainly I agree with this.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think (for instance) that the "Russia hacked our elections" narrative should qualify as populism, even though I definitely think it could at times collapse a complex topic (foreign interference in US elections) into a simple narrative about how things could be great if not for Russian schemes and all we need to do is implement counter-disinformation schemes and all free speech concerns were made up by MAGA-types to prevent good policy.
Wikipedia's stab at it is more "political stances that emphasise the idea of the "common people", often in opposition to a perceived elite" and I think I prefer that definition, even with the typo - it seems both less pejorative and less prone to "everything is populism."
Bad events are setbacks. The kind of thing we overcome. The decline I'm arguing against and would justify how we're better at dealing with communists coming to power now than we will be in five or ten years isn't caused by a recession, which while bad will pass.
Populists are making things worse by getting elected and putting pressure on politicians do things like rent control or putting broad tariffs on our allies. By antagonizing and polarizing the country to such a point where we're seriously considering electing people to the senate that deny the legitimacy of our nation or our elections.
This one is borderline, mostly because it doesn't really include a call for some quick fix. "Russia hacked our elections and thus we should disregard them and install me as president" would be populist. If you wanted to call it populist rhetoric I wouldn't argue too hard but it's not central to my reading.
What I'm saying is pretty compatible with this, as basically both populist wings have employed conspiracy theorizing to make some amorphous "elite"(billionaires, Epstein class, coastal elites, Capitalist, fascist, racists, patriarchy, international Jewry ect ect.) responsible for everything while declaring their own leadership as non-elite even if they're the president of the united states or a billionaire. In practice there aren't any two groups in existence you can't force into the plucky rebels vs empire framing that slop loving people won't slurp up if it gives them that "we're the righteous underdogs" tingles.
The decline that is most readily apparent to me relative to 1990 is the decline of the United States as the world's sole superpower relative to other nations. Pretty much everything else can still be argued, but that is a very unambiguous decline in relative standing. Do you disagree?
I agree with this, but it seems to me that there is always someone peddling bad ideas. Why are they gaining traction? It seems to me that all the answers point to some sort of decline (although to be fair that could be something like your setback and not like FC's decline).
Sure, this sort of rhetoric is very real. One of the problems with talking about populism is that while it is not true that "everything is populism" it is true that pretty much everyone makes populist appeals in a democracy, particularly if they don't have anything better to run on.
But why pound the table with this sort of rhetoric when you have a track record of good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burden of living?
This just seems like catch up economics, and in a way that mostly makes us better off. I wouldn't expect even a very well run US to permanently be so far ahead that even much more populous countries couldn't compete. It's a story of the rise of other places more than a decline at home. We're genuinely enriched by Northern European Optics and Medicine development. There is some argument I'm receptive to on protectionism in targeted cases but it's generally the case that we benefit from trade. We've declined in the sense that if we were the one healthy person in a home full of sick people that them recovering would represent a decline in our share of total strength.
The French Revolution was launched when things were improving and fought most radically in the areas that improved the most. One really can't say where there is discontent there is decline.
Because the good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burdens are like bitter medicine and unpalatable leafy greens while populist promise that actually sweet cocktails are not only tastier but healthier. Worse the presidential cycle and delayed impact of good policy often reward the populist elected because things weren't getting better fast enough the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the investments from the good policy even while they hand out the seed corn. Rent control is going to reduce the amount that some new yorkers pay in rent and it will take some time for the costs to come due. But they will and the hangover will be nasty.
I didn't say "trade bad." I said "the US had unambiguously declined relative to other countries as a superpower" which is largely a measure of relative military strength. Trade is actually pretty good for maintaining military strength in many ways.
I don't think this is entirely correct - the US made deliberate policy choices regarding China (including the transfer of military and dual-use technology) that got us to where we are today. But assume that the impact of that was negligible. It could be the case that due to catch up economics the US is in relative decline.
And I don't think it makes the US mostly better off not to be the only superpower. The US is not better off because of the war in Ukraine. It is not better off because it needs to maintain parity with China in the Pacific. Those situations make the US worse off. There's an argument that the US is still on net better off because of cheap Chinese labor, but I am skeptical of this: there's a lot of cheap labor out there.
The only way it makes the US better off is that is places restraints on the US itself. So perhaps that is for the best. But it seems like it would be much better for the United States for it to be a sole superpower and use its power wisely than deal with the risks of a multipolar world.
The American Revolution too, and I'd be very interested to see that pitch made (in particular I think there's a great argument that social media/the internet achieved a similar effect) but just because it happened twice does not mean it happened that way every time. I think your case would be stronger if you argued that this was what was happening based on specific facts. My argument (that the forces of stability, the educated elites, messed up - which I wouldn't consider monocausal, necessarily) is based on a lot of specific things that happened. The French Revolution is also admittedly a specific thing that happened but the connection here is merely by analogy.
I tend to agree with this but as phrased, this is mostly a generalized argument in favor of any policy that is painful over the short term and against policies that seem nice over the short term, (and as such an argument against, say, offshoring to China!) when I think the reality is slightly more complicated.
If we're just talking military strength then it's much more debatable and the whole story is China. Ukraine isn't really a sign of a decline in super power status Russia has been meddling in and doing military actions in non-allied nations this whole time and if anything their failure in Ukraine shows that they are not a peer nation. The Iran hostage crisis was in the 80s. Besides just that China is very big and rising I don't really see evidence of a decline in US military super power status, we remain the only nation that has demonstrated an ability to project force far from our borders and it's always been the case that that ability had limitations(vietnam, korea, afghanistan).
It's not my position that the rise of china's military might makes the US better off, it's my position that if you're talking about a declining united states I don't really think people's complaints are that in a hypothetical pacific theater China is marginally more able to push its weight around. Remember that they kicked us out of North Korea in the 50s. I don't think our relative military strength as compared to China can justify describing the US as in unceasing decline to the degree that we might as well have the democrats be overrun by actual communists.
I was mainly speaking economically. Arguments can be made about the amount of outsourcing and whether a different paths could have saved American manufacturing, I honestly think this is overstated, heavy protectionism hasn't prevented the decline of US automakers. And I've argued with Dase about China's not so friendly use of their own economic policy. But it's undeniable that we get a lot of cheap stuff out of china's rise. And not just cheap crap, good solar panels and electronics. If you want examples of things that have not only resisted inflation but dropped even in nominal terms stuff from china is a good start.
I mean the facts are the facts, we have a commenter upthread insisting that it doesn't matter whether his complaints about affordability are true because what really matters is the messaging or whatever. US Share of world GDP has been flat, it's the EU and Japan that collapsed to make room for China. The statistics do not show us in decline, I do not believe the doomers get to have the null hypothesis on this. I only bring up the french revolution as a counter example to if smoke then fire nature of your previous post, it's sufficient to show that smoke does not always mean fire.
I can speculate why the doomers believe what they do, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to distinguish from bolverism. Our culture is inculcated with an underdog narrative. The meek shall inherit the earth, the plucky rebels vs the tyrannical empire, the hopeless last stand of middle earth, Rocky, Miracle on Ice. Pick your western epic and there's a very good chance it's an underdog story. This is hard to square with being the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history. So we invent internal divisions, "maybe our nation itself is the evil empire" is one popular among lefties. "Maybe there is a shadowy extra-national(jews, cultural marxists, political Islam) force that has infected the state and we must free ourselves from it" is popular from the right. In either case a decline plays into the narrative. There is a handy justification for why the rebels actions are harmless(hurting a corpse doesn't count, the damage was over determined) and justified(only our radical action can restore us to glory).
Perhaps I've been reading too much the last psychiatrists lately as well but I see the pattern of "Frantic activity as a defense against impotence." Railing against the decline as some kind of systemic fait accompli frees the doomer from any obligation to set their own house in order. It feels like action to declare on a forum that the DSA might as well take over the democratic party but it doesn't actually require anyone to do anything but stew in their own pessimism.
You mentioned social media and that's also certainly a factor. Communications technology is another of the classic preludes to revolution and also often correlates with improvements rather than a decline. The number of times I've seen people unironically use the luxury of the family guy lifestyle, simpsons houses, or straight up watch ads from the 90s to argue for a decline in standard of living is incredible. Literally fictional evidence of a time that never existed. All while pelted with images of the lifestyles of the rich and famous that would simply have remained private in past times. This paragraph feels tired to write, none of it is novel, but it bears repeating. The rant from network(1976) remains true, the tube is not reality. The meta narrative of that movie is actually pretty interesting this light actually. It's a guy who's bit is basically the same as the doomers of today but in the 1970s. Could there be more proof of a this being a timeless trope? Anyways after this rant about the decline because of some specifics related to network television ownership shifting he is immediately won over by the new ownership and proceeds to preach their message instead of his previous radical one because the particulars really don't matter, only the sense of indignation matters.
I agree things are more complicated but that's broadly my point. We need to actually have a sober discussion about which policies are good and which are bad and seriously consider the trade offs and downstream impacts. Populists are not capable of this, they default to conspiracy theories of elites who inexplicably want the decline.
I think it's pretty clear, and it's not just China. Russia's military declined significantly in the 1990s (although 1990 was not its nadir, as I understand it) before a remodernization program under Putin. As far as China, a single US carrier battle group could probably have won a war against China in 1990. Does anyone think that is true today?
I agree that being a superpower has constraints, no doubt about it. But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.
I don't think this is true. Any time anyone is speaking of the need to race China or deal with China on AI, they are paying homage (however unwitting) to relative US decline. Nobody in the 1990s was worried about racing China in software development.
Unless you adjust for PPP, in which case it goes down 10 percentage points.
Sure, except that I listed a lot of bad decisions made by (I think it is relatively fair to say) the forces of stability, and you haven't presented either an alternative list or contested my list of bad decisions. This inclines me to think that the populists are at least partially right in their criticisms (which in my opinion implies nothing about their ability to properly govern).
I generally agree with all of your points about the narrative, about dooming as an excuse to avoid action, all of that stuff. But psychoanalyzing your ideological foes is also a (very seductive) form of doing this.
Yes, I think it's quite possible that this is exactly what we are seeing. What I find uncomfortable, though, is what the communications technology is pushing us towards - because it seems, to me, to be very unclear. The printing press pushed us towards clear, logical, ideological thinking - Protestantism, Marxism, the like. Radio and TV may have helped older interpersonal qualities return to the surface, but never really eclipsed the book or essay. But it seems to me the shape of Tik-Tok, AI slop and X posts is still uncertain. The old ideologies are still fighting, using the newer media as a skinsuit. Certainly I expect religious traditions to persist, but politically I feel like this far on we deserve something more interesting than unironic Marxism. So far, though, it seems like new media is better at critique than articulating a positive vision. So if communications technology is shaking up our hybrid book-TV world, what's going to emerge from that shakeup? I don't know, but I am very curious as to your take on this, now or as a topline post at some point.
Doomers are certainly a timeless trope. But doom and decline also come. Doomers are overfitting, not hallucinating ex nihilo.
I think it's more complicated than this, even. For instance, Vance is in the populist wing of the populist wing of the populist party, and I think he's
a Motte lurkerquite capable of this.I don't know how with a straight face you can say it's not just China after Russia's performance and the performance of other recent adversaries. I concur with the other takes that Iran was no victory for the US but have been careful to point out that as far as losses goes it wasn't a military loss. Russia can't even militarily push around its own region anymore. There is precisely one other pole candidate and it's China. And it's not like a unipolar world is the standard that we've fallen from, the soviets fell in the late 80s and early 90s. multi-polarity was the the norm for all but like 20 years.
Where exactly did it go? Mostly it bought us a free trade status quo in which we and many other nations became rich. The military adventurism wasn't exactly that successful nor provided much treasure.
Again, this has much more to do with a rise in China. And you know who we were worried about racing in technology? Japan. Which you don't hear much about now.
PPP as used for subjective spending power is a reasonable choice but it has a lot to do with local labor costs and you're basically double measuring the catch up we care about when you adjust for it. The US produces about as much as a percentage of the world total output, which is what we're kind of interested in when discussing a decline between nations, which by the way as I said from the beginning I don't really think is what people are feeling, I really don't think the American populist feeling of decline hinges on whether a Chinese person can buy more rice than their gdp per capita might naively predict. I don't think people have a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
This is just a kind of impossible measure. The status quo is of course going to catch strays for everything that goes wrong. They deflect most of the terrible ideas of populists which range from disastrous stuff like going back on a gold standard to implementing rent control. Much of our housing crisis I think can be laid at the feet of populists, it's largely the movement to give local control veto powers that has made it impossible to build where building is most necessary. But just naturally on the national level the stability forces built into our system of government have mostly held. Where they've failed recently has been disastrous blm lead defunding of the police which has resulted in thousands of excess murders and all the shenanigans Trump has gotten up to. Populists tried to dissolve our democracy on January 6th. It's awkward to bring up because I really don't want to get into the weeds with the populists on this board about whether actually our democracy was already dissolved by the democrats cheating, but it did happen, people did storm congress with the intent of overthrowing an election based on populist conspiracy theories. That's the kind of thing we can expect from an ascendant populist movement, the left version will be very bad as well.
I agree and that's why I resisted doing it for several posts, but you pushed for it. What else can I say? The statistical evidence that they're wrong is ignored and it's demanded that I explain where the energy of the movement comes from. If it's psychological in origin how can I avoid psychoanalysis? I might agree with them about some problem, housing is indeed to expensive, but there is an abundance, non-populist, style argument for why that is and then there is what the populists believe which is either some incoherent beliefs about landlord greed that doesn't extend to undercutting other landlords or it's that actually there are 600 million illegal immigrants bidding up the cost of housing. Both are untrue and no amount of evidence will satisfy them.
I don't know about this gloss! The printing press favored pamphlets. Rhetoric was as important as it is today on social media. Where it's all going I don't know. The major change with the social media age is that gate keepers and distribution is now gone, the memetic evolution chamber is now global and fast where previous iterations had locality. Both for memetic and political reasons the local election has been obliterated, after all the local government runs the national elections and if you're in the trump camp you think you need to be able to call on them to do recounts and if your in the democrat camp you're terrified that a future trump surrogate will call a local republican trifecta and demand they "find the votes" to name him the winner.
I think the globalization of everything will be the ultimate legacy of social media. Whatever meme is fittest will dominate and meme alignment is no more advanced than AI alignment.
Doomers have predicted 55 of the last 1 great depression. They're a rock with the text "doom is imminent" painted on them. Certainly there are things worth worrying about. I myself consider AI safety to be a critical concern. But I don't push it with conspiracy theories and unfounded accusations that people who disagree with me as demonic pedophiles.
I don't know if I'd qualify him like this. Vance is a cynical actor. He's willing to go along with and push populist rhetoric if it'll help his political ambitions. But he's a politician, as far as I'm concerned he's a sociopath. He'll tap into populism for power but he's not really swept up in it. He knows Trump didn't win in 2020 and only mouths the words because those the mouth noises that get him what he wants. A smart cynical operator can indeed engage in nuance, when it serves him. When I speak of populists his willingness to do the bidding of populists is certain relevant but I don't know if I'd count his ability to engage in depth is really the same as populist's ability to engage in depth.
I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
Sure.
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
I agree with this.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
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