Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

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This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?

I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:

1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):

> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.

Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.

2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:

> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."

> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.

>this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts

I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.

The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.

On the recommendation of the CDC, large outdoor events were canceled because of the risk of disease spread. Then came the BLM protests and the CDC said "no, actually those are different." If you want to be a scientific authority, you must avoid saying things that anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit.

As far as I can tell, this is false. The CDC did not offer guidance which said that protests should be treated differently from other outdoor events. If you can demonstrate otherwise, please do so.

>anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit

I’m not familiar with the facts of your anecdote, but clearly the CDC is a government agency and banning protests would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech, you would depend on the Supreme Court to get an exception.

It really is amazing that we've decided as a society that government bureaucrats and adjunct faculty are the elites of society while billionaires like Musk and Trump and the children of dynasties like RFK are counter-elite populists.

> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."

> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.

If the world is too complex for a “regular person” to understand then universal suffrage is a mistake.

Just say what you mean: you want technocracy or some other non representative or democratic form of government.

That seems like a radical reading of the text.

It is impossible for every citizen to fully understand every scientific issue. Part of living in a society—in fact, one of the primary purposes of living in a society—is having different people specialize in different things, and trusting each other to actually be good at what they specialize in.

None of this implies that people don't know enough to vote.

Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the available evidence suggests that a major part of the problem right now is people's votes being suppressed and people being poorly represented by their supposed representatives (both due to deliberate gerrymandering, and more simply due to the fact that the size of the House of Representatives was capped in the early 20th century, leading to one person representing hundreds of thousands or more, rather than the ~10k or so each they represented prior to the cap).

You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?

Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.

Reagan's words resonated because the public already believed them. He is not the cause. The public's fear of government power is not remotely irrational. It is the responsibility of the government to maintain public trust, not the responsibility of the public to trust their authority.

The Powell Memorandum (1971) explicitly building the case for business takeover of democracy (by in many ways undermining/sabotaging the public's belief in the United States as a government), for the record, was a decade old when Reagan was in office (1981).

The Powell Memorandum is famous for being incredible explicit, for the scope & scale of how and where it would seek to dominate and control the media and abuse courts, for example. But no, even 1971 was not the first business plot to takeover the government, to foment dissent to try to rip the nation apart & assert a capitalist / oligarchical government on/against these United States.

I agree the government has the obligation to maintain the trust of it's people. But my heavens, it is deeply woefully & sad that there is such a loud angry butter popular political party whose axis is revanchist hatred of the state. It's not grounded, it's not trying for better, it's not honest: it's a constant attack on the USA at all levels, and the party exists only because that is the only message most rich people will fund: the Powell Memorandum style plot to get rid of as much government as possible.

Reagan's words against the government are indeed old ideas. Part of a long scary tradition against the state.

There is no smoke filled room. The government lost public trust by sucking. It turned itself into a bureaucratic hellscape for rent seeking lawyers (of which the number has gone up 3x since 1970). to feed on. Its model of restricting supply of necessary commodities like housing and then subsidizing them has reached its limit. They lost public trust because they don't deserve it.

I reflect on the asymmetry of where we are now.

There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.

But if they also have to win the hearts and minds, ongoingly, against an advanced persistent threat of disinformation networks and the most well funded US citizens, working for a Powell Memorandum revolt of the elites, well...

It sure seems like doing governance is much much much harder than it used to be. The enemies of the state are making it much most costly, creating a vast unrest that saps constant energy and attention.

I can't 100% disagree with you. But there's been 50 years of well spoken plot to overburden the government and topple the state's ability to act. Whatever people are feeling today has certainly been deeply shaped by the centuries of the rich & their opposition to democracy & governance. That seems more clear and present than ever, seems so clear that people have been lead so strongly to dissent. We don't have any control groups to assess this by. But pleading that it's all genuine, none of this is manufactured, that it's all objectively deserved: I cannot imagine polarizing yourself so hard as to deny the air we breath, the information environment we've drowned in with Hastert Rule democracy, tiny little Tea Party shenanigans ruling the airwaves (vs vastly bigger No Kings getting barely mentions), and the Grok-goverened brave new X world. The propaganda of dissent and obstruction has been working, and it has fed and shaped and sharpened the crusade against the United States as a competent capable governing entity.

> There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.

It makes absolutely no difference what people want to do if they are not effective at it. I just look at the evidence here and the government is much more dysfunctional in Democrat run areas. Here's a Democrat voting economist admitting it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...

How can you blame the problem on republicans if it is worse where they have the least control? The current governance problems in the US are 100% a self-own.

I do not think it is fair to label a fear of communism or socialism as irrational.

Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.

Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.

Fox News was created because they didn't want another Watergate-level scandal be able to make R presidents lose popularity. It's surprising how effective it is.

> coastal elite attitude

There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.

It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.

The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.

> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.

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