Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public
thepullrequest.com
thepullrequest.com
>> The highest calling of true elites is to translate the flux of reality into a coherent story.
>> Perspectives on reality of course vary according to the ideals and institutions involved.
>> We are fractured creatures, trapped in a subjective perspective, but we are also symbolic animals, viscerally craving a meaning for our individual lives that is universally acknowledged and so transcends individuality.
>> Belief is the default. What needs to be explained is systematic cynicism or unbelief: it’s a pathological state that makes individuals miserable and society untenable.
>> The public is disenchanted in the elites and their institutions, much in the way science disenchanted the world of fairies and goblins.
>> All you need is a smart phone and a sufficient measure of anger against.
>> The lust for destruction, rather than fascism or some “successor ideology,” looms as the great threat to democracy today.
>> For all the anger, we live pretty comfortably within this evil old system.
>> Websites must compete for attention and so practice the art of the rant.
>> Newspapers are trying to survive by selling polarization.
>> I have learned that the best way to be wrong in public is to make a prediction.
>> On the web, you can vote on anything, at any time. I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing, but it’s the purest form of democracy, and explanations about why it’s not a good thing always start with the assumption that the elites are smarter than the voters.
>> Like I said, I’m really old, and one of the few things one learns with age, young Antonio, is that there are many more important things than personal vanity.
>The usual economic explanations explain nothing, in my opinion.
Pretty sure Sanders disagrees.
> In the last century, two generations of elites tackled the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, and came ahead on every count. They built the great dams and nuclear plants that electrified the country, and threw in the interstate highway grid for good measure. What has changed?
What! Completely overlooking the popular nature of these accomplishments. Watch interviews with even telephone operators for major government projectsin the 40s and 50s and you'll see a pride in them even a fairly senior governmental manager would not display today. People believed in these things and I think not because of their faith in elites but because they saw these instructions employing their friends and neighbors. People believed in their team. There were overlapping institutions like church which also connected people. We have a huge decline in people doing things together. Mass media could in part be to blame but Reagan style cowboy individuality might be too.
> I will say this: the struggle today is structural, not personality-dependent. Even an FDR or a Reagan would have difficulty preserving institutions whose authority has collapsed because of a radical reversal in the information environment.
Absolutely. See the failures of one Barrack Obama
> As flawed as these narratives were and are--the map was very definitely not the territory--they were coherent worldviews that helped that society navigate reality.
This accurately describes the media of the post WWII era but totally ignores the hodgepodge corrupt media landscapes of the late 19th century and early 20th century. You think people are in a bubble now. Imagine getting all your news from one or two papers which were directly party appartuses and probably ethnically isolated.
> The most disruptive innovation of this nature was surely the printing press.
I think this point is taken too often for granted. 1848 begs to differ. At the time the printing press came about regional european powers were beginning to equalize in strength. The decline of hedgemons could as easily be responsible for reforms theology as the press. You can't set up your own church unless you can keep the Pope's armies out. Once you can it's only a matter of time until controlling your regional branch of the church becomes desirable enough to break things off.
> History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms
Oh come on. This is pure progressivism. There's no "conservation of momentum" in history. No one decides or devine's the rules of what will and won't happen next. Nothing is ever the same and nothing is ever new but change can be heavily weighted to looking much like it did before. Maybe we won't get the third reich again but am ecofascist exclusionary state could absolutely be in the cards. Just as America now greatly resembles Empiral Britain at it's zenith and turn towards decline.
> At the individual level, the nihilist is the random shooter who stalks into a gay bar or a mosque and slaughters dozens of innocent strangers.
This is borderline, "video games cause school shooting" level of association. Political nihilism is not obviously the proximate cause of lone wolf violence. In fact such violence often comes from those politically irrelevant or even activated by a sense of these acts leading to a kind of victory. Timothy McVeigh viewed his action as a successful pokticial act not as a "fuck it, burn it down" shrug.
What I can't help feeling about this writing is that it has fallen deeply for the progressive narrative that is popular in both the elite Republican and Democratic parties. Not to be confused with contemporary "progressivism". Rather the narrative that links Washington, Lincoln, TR, FDR, sometimes LBJ and sometimes Reagan into a single progression of civil cosmopolitan liberty. I'm not saying here that that narrative is necessarily wrong. But to get this far on an intellectual level and not interogate closer the conflicts which bred these changes and the places where equality has failed to find a hold on liberal democracy. It's like taking for granted labor progress as a part of liberal democracy. As if it will just happen and left movements didn't have something powerful to do with that.
Whiles it's not "end of history", it reads very "end of history but...". Regardless of my complaints it's very thought provoking but I am getting a Slavoj Zizek, lapping himself in his own rationalism, vibe.
Should be more fodder for breaking up and beefing up regulations on tech companies
>"Liberal democracy is still the only game in town. You can’t compete with it – but you can destroy it. You can smash it to bits and put nothing in its place. You can bring down an avenging chaos on a corrupt world. So when you ask whether today’s protests will ever lead to anything, the answer is probably not. They have little positive content."
If we use his paradigm to analyze the 'tech situation', the most likely outcome is furious protests, with no ability to cohere around any specific action.
They could start by not putting themselves in the position of being arbiters of information. As Gurri said, a little humility would go a long way.
Who exactly is going to participate in "furious protests" against breaking up mega tech companies? lol
... The furious protests would be against the tech companies, but those protesters would not be able to cohere around a specific action.
The closest analogy would be Occupy Wall St. There were large protests, and not many counter-protests (other than the tangentially related Tea Party ones, which were anti-government, not pro-Wall St.).
It seems China with its repressive apparatus put a clamp on Inteenet and free flow of information.
Lot of his argument fall apart, if there is an alternative he isn't willing to entertain.
> any measure is almost impossible
But yeah, my beef is with the Gurri. Not all of his description line up with reality.
> Today the big issue is… what? Wearing MAGA hats? Racism certainly isn’t a divisive issue. Everybody’s against it. Capitalism isn’t much of an issue. Nobody even talks about class or poverty any more. Identity’s too diffuse and dispersed – if identitarians started fighting, it would look more like a scrum than a civil war.
That's not honest. It would be like saying that Reagan supporters in the 1980s only cared about welfare queens, without any substantive policy preferences regarding industrial regulation, unions, defense, etc. In reality "welfare queens" was short-hand for all the substantive policy preferences demanded by conservatives, as well as a statement about the perceived consequences of the excesses of liberal policies. Similar, MAGA hat derision is a liberal statement about the irony of promoting conservative, free market, anti-social safety net policies to "Make America Great Again" when from the left's perspective all the agreed upon societal ills--e.g. loss of blue collar jobs to free trade, lack of income growth combined with increasing income disparity, corporate oligopolies, etc--are a consequence of conservative, Republican, policies. The GOP was the architect of both NAFTA and China entering GATT/WTO.[1] The "neoliberal" movement in the Democratic party was a conservative movement; it was an adoption by some Democrats of conservative Republican economic policies in an attempt to win over increasingly Republican-leaning voters who had been successfully persuaded that traditionally Democratic economic policies (e.g. antagonism to free trade, pro union, "tax & spend" entitlements, etc) were hostile to job growth. And just as Democrats were scrambling to realign their economic platforms with the rightward shift in the electorate, so too was Labor doing exactly the same thing in the U.K. Thatcher and Reagan ushered in the preeminence of conservative economic policies, and Blair and Clinton were late-stage responses to that. To then blame Democrats and their "neoliberal" policies for the legacy of conservative (classically "liberal" outside the Anglosphere--note the semantic games) economic policies is... rich.
I'm sorry, but either Martin Gurri is less than 25 years old, or he's willfully misrepresenting actual, factual, not-particularly-distant political history. I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and he's simply using obtuse, scholarly-sounding terminology to sell a constructed narrative popular among far too many conservatives. I'm familiar with the tactic having heard plenty of similar B.S. political fantasies (e.g. Marxist, Fascist, etc, arguments) that build plausible seeming narratives around hidden, false premises.
There's plenty of blame to go around regarding contemporary cultural divisions. The conservatives were right in their criticisms of the left's identity politics and victim culture. Indeed, identity politics has swallowed up everybody, and it turns out the empowered and entitled often make for the most sympathetic victims of all. But let's be clear about who promoted what, when, and why before we start naming our oppressors and nominating our saviors.
[1] When NAFTA passed under a Clinton presidency, 2/3 of House Republicans voted for it (including Newt Gingrich, who successfully helped to push through special "fast-track" voting rules), while only 1/3 of Democrats voted for it. President Clinton, like Tony Blair in the U.K., was seen as successful precisely because of his conservative economic policies. Clinton also supported GOP authored welfare reform, including block grants to states (which Democrats feared would be directed away from the working class), despite fierce opposition from his own party.
But even if this is accepted for the sake of argument (I'm not sure it's entirely true, but let's assume it is), the left has not done what a sane political party should do when these things happen: penalize their own party leaders who let it happen. If Clinton allowed NAFTA to pass despite his own party's fierce opposition, why didn't the party fire him? Why didn't some other candidate beat him in the 1996 primaries? Why did the Democrats continue to protect him despite the fact that he's a womanizer and a liar? And why does the party machine of which he and his wife are poster child beneficiaries continue to run the party despite the fact that it obviously doesn't represent the will of the people? If it did, Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic candidate for President in 2016, and again in 2020 (and he might have won in 2016).
In other words, I think Gurri is correct that the left talks a lot about reforms it says it wants, but doesn't back up its talk with action.
Both parties continue to self-sort in unhealthy ways. The GOP needs more diversity (but of course, is doubling-down on gerrymandering) and the Democrats, frankly, need less. I'd love to trade off some fiscally conservative Democrats for some working-collar populist Republicans. Bernie's support came from appealing to what used to be the base of the Democratic party: the working-class. But it's not enough voters in the raucous big-tent Democratic party to win a primary, and likely not the general election.
We also can't even have a serious conversation about policy since the GOP attacks everything the Democrats do as socialism.
Anyway, to your last point: the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play.
Also, look, voters are weird. I volunteered as a Democratic poll greeter here in NC with two women, both professionals, a white woman originally from Cincinnati and a Black woman originally from New Jersey. They'd both voted for Biden in the primary. I was like, what, why? Why didn't you pick someone more progressive? They both said: "because Biden is who we thought would make the strongest general election candidate." So they're not even voting on who they think is best, but who they think the rest of America will accept.
p.s. don't be so hard on Hillary. Let's not forget that she expended a lot of political capital trying to pass universal healthcare. She got killed on that, by Democrats and Republicans alike. I think that really changed her idea of what was possible in politics in the US. She is not the devil she's been made out to be.
I agree.
> the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play
If by "the left" you mean people like Bernie Sanders, I agree. But his hand isn't strong enough not because he's a leftist, but because he's an outsider. The insider policies of the Democratic party are just as leftist; they're just a different flavor of leftist--roughly speaking, New Left vs. Sanders-style Old Left, hardball power politics vs. "softer" socialism. That's also why the Democrats now are just fine allying with Wall Street and big business: power politics needs financing, and that's where the money is.
> don't be so hard on Hillary
You're entitled to your opinion, but I'm also entitled to mine.
The one thing Democrats can do is dictate what republicans won’t back by taking it on themselves. There’s got to be a way to snap back go normalcy that way
In this case there is no middle as there is no place to compromise between "any" and "none".
He can't pass an infrastructure plan because anything of that scope requires persuasion and compromise across many competing interests, things I believe he's constitutionally incapable of. It's the same reason he never had a healthcare bill. If he can't strong arm a deal, he can't get it done at all. I think he actually used the bully pulpit of the presidency to pretty poor effect as far as that goes.
I think Trump doesn't even know what those words mean.
My point is that Trump is almost the perfect president to get this done because he has purchase with the base even when he contradicts orthodoxy. A conservative nervous about being primaried for voting for a big government program like this has all the necessary cover to vote for it under Trump. That they could not get it done under Trump I see as incredible evidence of the party's commitment to austerity government.
Look at the fight over food stamps we have every time the farm bill comes around. SNAP costs about 1/3 of 1 percent of GDP. It helps ag and basically extends food security to the entire country. But Republicans fight over it like it's Medicare. I'm not condemning them for this. I happen to disagree but they fundamentally believe, no matter the cost benefit analysis that the government should not do these things and cannot conduct them effectively. It is hard for people to understand because we are so used to the post war order in which both sides believe in government up to a certain point at least.
Edit-On the original topic of getting the two sides to agree on things, I think the fundamental problem is the us/them dynamic between urban and rural communities. I further posit that a large government program to employ these two communities together would go a long way toward building a communal bridge between them. If people in rural America saw the rest of the country building things like high speed rail to make them less isolated they would see promise for better days in the future. Ie make it so that people can live in rural areas and take a train into work in a city in minutes. Property valuations will increase. Crime will decrease through frankly there being better options all around. (Though I still think a revamped drug scheduling system needs to address the source of crime.)
Sure, push to make cars more fuel efficient, push for ways to make fuel for cars that's more closed cycle (like biofuel), push to spread more infrastructure to make things like electric cars or plug-in hybrids feasible. But when you have a population that is very, very spread out, there is no such thing as "mass transit", and we just have to deal with that fact.
Another option is to actually have underground tunnels for vehicles to drive through in tightly controlled settings. That way you take the driver out of it - and maybe can install ways to power vehicles internally. You could take that system any time of day without regard for weather, it could be centrally ran and administered ie little room for accidents, and thus depend on it for quick access to daily duties like work.
Edit: I do not buy that death threats have anything to do with the present stalemate. We are nowhere near a historic high water mark for pokticial violence in this country. The 1850s, turn of the century and 1960s were all very violent periods and the US government did not find itself paralyzed then.
The biggest change is that one party has been over run by a philosophy that the government simply cannot do things well or make them better. You cannot launch a ship when half the crew denies that it will float.
> Anyway, to your last point: the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play.
If those farther left types don't have enough support even to win the Democratic primary, how will they do in the actual race?
> Today the big issue is… what? Wearing MAGA hats? Racism certainly isn’t a divisive issue. Everybody’s against it.
In light of the past months of Black Lives Matter protests, counter-protests by white supremacists (who often enjoyed the support of law enforcement), and overt race baiting by Trump and his surrogates, claiming that racism isn't a divisive issue in American society is tone deaf at best.
Lasch saw this at work in the 1970s, FWIIW, which is why Gurri is talking about him. Lasch was an actual Marxist, though he eventually made common cause with Paleocons because he saw the cheerful "left wing" atomization of the family as incredibly destructive for working people, which, of course, was true.
It's a titanic shift; I'm old enough to remember guys like Walter Mondale and Tip O'Neill who made Bernie look like an Ayn Rand fan; they were mainstream democrats who actually did help the working man. Now, even the far left are screeching ninnies who are obsessed with things which would actually destroy the working man's life more than the last 40 years already have.
I think he would say that the ongoing fallout is caused by structural changes in communication networks, and that the players who happen to be at the top of the pile economically are incidental to that process.
This is absolutely false, would you rather live in Haiti or China? Also, what makes "Democracy" isn't really clear, you don't necessarily have a say in what you'd like in Democracy. It's just a vehicle to give government legitimacy, even if the votes don't actually matter or are even real.
> We can't even have a civil war, as it's impossible to draw the lines.
This is more false hope, it's very easy to have a civil war even without clear lines. Aggrieved parties just need to pick up a rifle and attack their enemies. You don't need uniforms and flags to have an insurgency.
I could be wrong.
I think he's right, though, that mostly you need young men hopped up on testosterone for a conflict like a civil war to happen.
I think if you're over twenty-five, you're unlikely to volunteer for things that are likely to kill you, and that actually forms strong backpressure against large-scale violence in the US.
But let's do some fun math. Roughly 70 million voted for Trump. Take away the housewives, the boomers, the Latinos in Florida and the less fanatical, more old-school Republicans that delivered Texas.
So let's say "only" a million are left out of the 70 and let's say that "only" a third of those - so 300k are willing to go to war for "their" President.
That's still huge trouble for this country. No, we won't be a failed state but a never-ending far-right insurgency that right-wing and foreign media constantly encourage and feed while the GOP publicly disavow is not something that we know how to deal with either.
The Left will be on the receiving end of it all by its very nature it will be reluctant to confront it beyond "let's talk about it".
Exactly this. Retroactively, we combine groups and intentions to simplify the narrative of most conflicts. With good reason, following the dizzying array of groups and actions involved in any conflict is impossible for all but the most determined and specialized scholars. The popular story has to be simplified.
Most civil wars start as multilateral conflicts. But once groups start getting picked off, the others begin combining into larger structure to preserve themselves and increase their chances of having a stake in victory. Just because you can't see the lines now does not mean they can't emerge after the conflict begins.
I do think the point about age is relevant. It's well know that things like crime decrease significantly with age. We also don't have much historical precedent for the kind of aged populations post industrial countries have.