The Five Crises of the American Regime | Hacker News Reader

The Five Crises of the American Regime

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12 pointsandrewla22 comments

This is some real low-effort enlightened centrism nonsense. The author basically just says "both sides bad" and then points out that comparisons to Weimar Germany or Rome are bad, but don't worry, they'll mention them anyway.

What did you think about the parts where they discuss economics and demographics?

They make some interesting points about religion, particularly around how the left abandoned it, but absolutely miss the forest for the trees when discussing demographics. They vaguely describe what I would call intersectionalism, but they take such a reductionist approach that it really misses the point. They call it a bunch of "categories", which is pretty misleading, in my opinion. They also are pretty harsh with how they describe those categories meshing into local communities, missing the forest for the trees in how intersectionalism is a micro view and communities are the macro.

On economics, I agree with the author that it's very difficult to start a family in America right now. They're mostly on the money about the unions and wage problems, but they again betray their underlying opinions by lumping Democrats in with Republicans on this issue where they honestly might be the most different.

I would agree with the author about the "knowledge economy" not working out like we thought, though I'd attribute that to skyrocketing education costs and other educational system issues, not wage issues. One could argue better wages would help, though. I would accept that.

I think the author betrays their own opinions several times in this article. They're scathingly critical of the left, but paint the right as essentially just victims of the above mentioned "categories" that have sprung up.

Democrats are not blameless, and I'm first in line to be critical of the politicians I have voted for, but Republicans are also not innocent victims.

> Democrats are not blameless, and I'm first in line to be critical of the politicians I have voted for, but Republicans are also not innocent victims.

Honestly, I can’t see how or why you would accuse the author of this, given paragraphs like this:

“The Republicans started the cycle of escalation in the 1990s. Rejecting the very idea of a bipartisan consensus, Newt Gingrich disseminated a partisan vocabulary to make it appear that Republicans favored the opposite of everything Democrats favored. Gingrich told Republicans to contrast the “conservative opportunity society” with “the liberal welfare state.” Semantic warfare was combined with quasi-military organization, as Gingrich and his Republican successors imposed a degree of discipline on the Republican Party in Congress that was alien to American traditions.”

Their skew is more obvious when the author starts discussing the demographics and social issues sections. I also can't stomach an equivocation of the protests we had over the summer to the protests we just experienced at the Capitol. Nuance and context has never been a skill of these types, though.

What statements you are reading as equivocation? I can’t see where the author makes any comparison between the two at all, but perhaps I missed something.

Also, it seems like you have just dismissed the author entirely as a ‘type’. Again I don’t see how that helps.

They boiled down demographics and social issues to a bunch of "categories" but I'm not allowed to call them a "type"? That seems unfair.

They point out that in the last two months there's been 2 different Capitols, one stormed by the right, one stormed by the left. On face value, that's true, but they're implicitly declaring them as equally bad. It just lacks the context or nuance of _why_ each of them happened.

One of them was a response to police brutality and extra-judicial killings of their community members, and the other was an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected President, or at least stall the process for it. You can be critical of the CHAZ (which I am) and still recognize that it wasn't anywhere near the same as storming our nation's Capitol with the intent of stalling and disrupting the election process for our President.

I'm probably what most would call a socialist, and I'm all for discussions about labor and wages and class consciousness, and that seems like what this author is, albeit in a hamfisted way, getting at, but they're just coming across as a smug to me.

‘They boiled down demographics and social issues to a bunch of "categories" but I'm not allowed to call them a "type"? That seems unfair.’

You’re going to need to provide a quote for that. I don’t see where they did this, in fact I see the opposite. They criticized the boiling down of demographics and social issues to categories.

As to calling it ‘unfair’. I don’t see what fairness has to do with this. Adopting a political opponent’s harmful strategies just makes you no different from them. It doesn’t make the strategy helpful.

I really don’t see anything they say that implies that the author sees equivalence between these two acts.

What is certainly true is that the two ‘sides’ see their own acts as justified and the other sides as unjustified.

I personally agree with you that there is no parity between the two. Trump attempted a coup, whereas BLM staged a protest to get their grievances heard. You can extrapolate from CHAZ to a desire to undermine our democratic process, but you have to extrapolate a very long way, whereas no extrapolation is needed in the case of the Capitol riots.

However I just don’t see where the author is ‘implying’ they are the same. Only that they both symptoms of the deeper problems that are being described.

I couldn’t get past the first several paragraphs because the article drips with smug superiority by adopting the trope of being above it all and “blaming both sides”.

It claims that it was going to explain why the US regime has failed, but so far seems only to name drop and blame various well known politicians.

I’d like to read the simplified, less narrative summary of the main argument of this article to see if the thesis makes sense or offers any explanatory power.

Dismissing something as ‘bothsidesism’ doesn’t tell us anything.

I agree with you that declaring ‘failure’ is essentially bullshit, and that is a fault with the article. Either we learn from the situation or we don’t.

However I don’t see what’s wrong with chronicling how political themes are systemic and not associated with a particular party.

In any case, the piece does a lot more just blame politicians, and talks about structural forces such as demographics and economics and how they lead to this situation.

Why dismiss that?

I repudiate the tone and style and not the content.

For whatever reason, the author comes off as "other and separate" from the problematic system, rather than an earnest participant interested in improving the system. Seems to lack humility or curiosity. The presentation prevented me from getting into (the admittedly familiar) material re: structural faults of neoliberal capitalism and American exceptionalism.

Can you quote anything that shows how they come off this way?

No, because “it’s just like, my opinion, man.”

In all seriousness, my issues with it are my own, and if you don’t get the same tone from reading the first few paragraphs: that’s totally ok.

So I don’t think I’d be able to make a strong case to someone skeptical. Chances are, it wasn’t the author’s intent and the author isn’t as shallow and pedantic as this article makes them seem to me.

“pedantic as this article makes them seem to me.”

The article doesn’t make them seem anything.

You have done nothing but attack the author, rather than the substance.

At best that’s a poor kind of reasoning.

Michael Lind is a big fan of Burnham's ideas about how the divides in our society tend to be more along the lines of productive individuals (which are both workers and entrepreneurs and organizers and generally people with domain-specific skills) who add value, and the class of managerial elites (middle managers, self-designated experts who consider themselves generalists).

If you genuinely see the Republicans as a force for evil and the Democrats as a force for good, then I don't think you're going to enjoy his work.

If you see the hyper-concentration of power in our society (in finance, in business, in politics) as problematic and are curious about the reasons for it and more information about it, and what some ideas about how to address it, then this article is a good introduction to some of the concepts.

You can be recognize the hyper-concentration of power in our society as a problem and simultaneously recognize that the parties are not equally responsible for that problem.

Why is apportionment of blame even useful?

How does it help us to decide what we can do to make things better?

It's not appointment of blame, it's appointment of cause, which is fundamental if you're trying to solve for the _problem_.

Is it? The entire piece is about examining broader causes without blaming a particularly group.

I am not sure that there is a meaningful distinction between ‘blaming’ a group and saying the group caused the problem.

Both are about identifying a group of people as the problem.

> The entire piece is about examining broader causes without blaming a particularly group.

I'm not sure I would agree with that. It seems more like the piece is about blaming both sides and saying that they have the solution, but the author hasn't done a good job of explaining to me _why_ they should be trusted or listened to.

Again I see no blame. What I see is a description of how the frames the two sides use, largely in response to one another, don’t accurately capture the causes of the current problem.

The author is selling a book in which they say more.

The author’s thesis is that the causes are not captured by the political discourse, but are in fact structural, and they attempt to contrast the discourse with these structural ideas that they think are causal.

If you are convinced that the causes are rooted in the behavior of one ‘side’ then you clearly disagree with the author and are unlikely to trust or listen to them.

“What is to be done? I have my own thoughts about how to build a new America in the ruins of the one that has collapsed, which I discuss in my book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite and elsewhere. But the painstaking reconstruction of the United States, if it takes place, will be the work of several generations and the challenge is not one to be met by 10-point plans and PowerPoints. First we must agree on the causes of the collapse of the latest in a series of historic American regimes. To that discussion, this essay is a contribution.”

You basically got a sense of it.

The article assumes attachment to these premises:

1. The United States, as a nation, is or was fundamentally good.

2. Economic liberalism(capitalist society - free markets, private property, etc.) is fundamentally good.

3. Traditional society and its communities(religion, family structure, etc.) was fundamentally good.

4. The political unity that defined the post-war US was fundamentally good.

Then the arguments made are based around the deviation from these unquestioned norms. If these things are good, then the politicians are bad - on both sides - because they instigated and escalated division, and must also take all the blame for economic problems because they allowed the outsourcing of labor, and for social problems because they allowed more women and immigrants in the workforce and disrupted the traditional society. Note that I list four assumptions, not five. That's because the politics are listed as a crisis separate from national identity.

The rest of the article is summaries of these deviations, which you have surely read in other articles.

The author concludes with "we must agree these things are the issue before we can rebuild a society".

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