Quadrant III isn't irrelevant though. A huge chunk of them do vote, and when they do, they're running a crude but genuinely functional evaluation: is the economy doing well, does the person in charge seem competent, is the world on fire. That's where Wlezien's "thermostatic" model of public opinion comes from. When policy moves too far left, the public drifts right. When it moves too far right, they drift back. The low-information voter is the main carrier of that signal.
This actually strengthens your case for democracy in a way you're underselling. You say democracy is "fine" because the masses are passive and elites steer them, but that's a pretty fragile version of the argument. The stronger version is that Quadrant III is responsive in broadly sensible ways. They don't know what's in the infrastructure bill. They don't care about ideological fights. They just register whether things feel like they're going well or badly, and shift accordingly. And that works precisely because they don't have developed political views and don't follow the daily content war.
Which also clarifies why Quadrant IV is actually destructive rather than just annoying. The problem isn't that dumb people started participating. Dumb people were always participating, as Quadrant III voters, and that was fine. The problem is they switched from the thermostatic mode (judge by outcomes, punish apparent incompetence, and don't vote much) to the ideological-entertainment mode (judge by tribal loyalty, consume politics as content, vote more often). They moved from a system where their lack of information didn't matter because the heuristics were more outcome-tracking, into one where the heuristics are identity-tracking.
Which isn't to say it's a bad comment - I found it insightful. That in itself is interesting to me. It seems to be the most-liked comment at the moment. Maybe one day soon there will be a "get Claude's take" button at the bottom of articles.
I am a big misanthrope and am absolutely here for arguments that large chunks of the population are too dumb to be involved in the political process. The problem I have with this argument, though, is that there's clearly a pretty substantial chunk of crazy elites as well. Contained within the conservative movement, and staffing the Trump administration now, are a large number of absolutely radicalized rightwing pseudo-intellectuals, people who think Curtis Yarvin is deep, etc. (In fact, Hanania has written about their pathologies at length!) I view them as much more dangerous than the large mass of clearly dumb people on the street- they're organized, more competent, clearly have the levers of power at the moment, etc. Social movements are always composed of a small number of radicalized intellectuals, never the proletariat.
Antivax is a great example of this- yes, there was always a small minority of dumb antivaxxers. But conservative elites & influencers pushing this stuff in the last 6 years has greatly increased antivax sentiment among the large population of Average Conservative-Leaning Guy On The Street. The antivax crowd has grown dramatically specifically due to crazy elites, not the other way around.
I find this a much more difficult problem to solve
Yeah, of course there's internecine disagreement within Quadrant I, smart MAGAs and such. But I think that the politics of smart MAGAs are - despite their individual intelligence - nonetheless of disproportionate appeal to Quadrant IV. Curtis Yarvin himself (as one example) is obviously smart, as are most of his really devoted followers. But Moldbug-ism/neoreaction, as it manifests as a practical political program, appeals to Quadrant IV much more than Quadrants I and II. Trump tees them up by making Quadrant IV so large - without that context, Quadrant I MAGA wouldn't have the voting power to be influential.
But I feel like the engine driving them via audience capture is still the masses. JD Vance used to be normal.
As for Yarvin, I don't know how influential he is on his own. Would he be this popular if not for the furnace of traditional racists and conspiracy theorists? Its possible he is the post-rationalization for smart people's beliefs rather than the actual engine
Try to be sanguine about the anti-vax movement. To the rest of us who want to get vaccinated, it doesn't really matter. If 50,000 unvaccinated children get measles, who cares? Only a few will get really sick or die, and almost certainly none of them are our vaccinated kids. (In the rare child who gets measles despite being vaccinated, the disease is invariably mild.) And if a few do die, then their deaths may convince parents that, hmm, maybe measles vaccine was a good idea. Or it was God's will that her child died. Either way, I don't care. Do you?
Ditto for other vaccine-preventable diseases like polio, tetanus, and diphtheria. Your personal protection comes from being vaccinated yourself and is not materially affected by the vaccination choices of anybody else. And for diseases that are only modestly preventable by vaccination, like influenza and Covid, even more so. Modest protection is just not robust enough to have much impact on how an outbreak spreads. But you might get less severe disease yourself if you are vaccinated, so go for it.
Much is made of herd immunity, that if almost everyone is vaccinated, then disease doesn't spread even to those few unvaccinated. Which is true. But the point is that it is even better to get vaccinated yourself, and not worry about falling herd immunity from the unvaccinated. There will be a few children who can't get vaccinated with live-virus vaccines (like measles) whose parents have to be vigilant if an outbreak occurs among the unvaccinated. The sad truth is that the antivaxxers don't care about that unvaccinatable child and aren't going to get theirs vaccinated just to protect him. Hard lesson in human nature, but that's what we are as a species. You can't claim that your neighbour owes you a duty of protection in the form of accepting vaccination....or much else, frankly.
Of all the trouble that can be blamed on the Quad IV dumb right, anti-vax is right near the bottom of the list in importance.
It's a good enough theory, I think, to explain what's happening on the bottom.
It probably doesn't give enough attention to the top. What causes elites to be good or bad, involved or uninvolved? Aside from that brief comment on Obama and Macron.
I guess you could say it is encouraging to elites, and tends to promote better behavior, when a political vision is offered that combines a genuinely positive vision for the common good with economic rationality.
When politics is nakedly cynical, that only breeds more cynicism. When one party or the other is behaving irrationally, elites will work to stop it out of self-interest, but without someone supplying a positive vision, that's as far as it goes. E.g. California's proposed confiscatory wealth tax, which has "activated" figures like Sergey Brin, but not in a way that seems supportive of any vision broader than "stop confiscatory wealth taxes".
A criticism made of Silicon Valley -- and perhaps more broadly of our contemporary globalized/cosmopolitan elite class -- is that it lacks a sense of noblesse oblige or connection to the nation. It is less interested in building up institutions and amenities in the cities where it finds itself, because it recognizes all connections to geography as temporary and fungible.
I guess you could just dismiss this as a stupid populist talking point, but it seems to come across as a legitimate difference in how elites have come to operate over time. You could perhaps include some observations from Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" here, how elites have physically separated themselves from the lower classes and ceased investing in common institutions. Which is individually rational, but the differences it creates lend fuel to the populist fire.
Does Hanania sort of cover the question of bad elites by saying:
"Stupid people will explicitly tell you what they’re angry about: vaccines, having to see brown people, women not knowing their place, gender non-conformity, pedophile conspiracies, etc. Populist-leaning intellectuals like to pretend that these are just excuses and the true source of pain is always material."
I take it to mean they are still badly motivated but intellectualize it
I would take this back even further. The growth of quadrant four began in the 90s with talk radio, and got even larger during the 2000s due to the growth of cable news, especially Fox News. The Republicans missed out on a bunch of Senate seats due to some bonkers nominees that wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without talk radio and Fox News.
Trump activating Quadrant 4 is an interesting explanation, but given the similar trends in Europe I'd suggest it's overdetermined.
In Western Europe, the rough pattern was that various centre-right parties moved notably to the left during the late 90s and early 2000s, largely to compete with centre-left parties moving towards the right after the fall of Keynsianism and/or the USSR. This created a gap in the market to their right, which was eventually (after much struggle) filled by the new right-wing nationalist parties (AfD, Reform, RN etc.). The centre of gravity in all these parties is a few rungs down the social ladder over the parties they replaced, which shows up in policy terms as being less market-oriented.
In the US, the Democrats also moved to the centre in the 90s. The Republicans then did likewise under Bush. They then had a similar struggle, which due to the US having primary elections was all intra-party. This originally manifested as libertarianism (Ron Paul), then a kind of nominal libertarianism combined with prole-signalling (Tea Party, Sarah Palin) before settling on Trump, who ditched the Libertarianism and replaced it with opposition to immigration, "bringing jobs back" and not much else.
I think the best explanation for the US taking a strange course through libertarianism and then settling on Trump is just that the US doesn't really have any indigenous right-wing political traditions. Europeans who want orderliness/wholesomeness/deference/industriousness have a post-fascist (RN in France and FdI in Italy have their roots in Vichy and Salo respectively) and European conservative movement to look to. American conservatism was never much more than soft-libertarianism, fundamentalist Christianity and opposition to liberalism, so there's no ideology for it to gravitate towards. There's also no infrastructure for the same reason.
My point here is that Trump+grifters became the dominant force on the right because no-one else really tried to fill that gap in the market. If Scott Walker or whomever had come out for reducing immigration, cracking down on crime/protestors and improving state capacity, he'd have filled the gap instead. He would have had a harder time though, as he'd need to have built a new ideology and movement to work with; Trump+grifters' advantage is they can motivate and co-ordinate people without a coherent intellectual framework, and build such organisation as they need on the fly out of lunatics and grifters.
The reason I think all of this isn't the "box 4 expanding" point is that most of the right-wing voters who've gone over to Trump's parents were just as involved with politics and happy to vote for Reagan. Trump has undoubtedly won over a few bottom-of-the-barrel types (e.g. his over performance with male rednecks and hispanics) with his WWE-adjacent persona, but these aren't the mass of his support, don't win him primaries (both his own and his endorsees) and aren't very connected to his grifter-network (Jésus the wrestling-watching roofer isn't working at the State Department). The conspiracy-theorists are more perennial everywhere, but are to ideology what the grifters are to organisation; they're the cheapest thing you can just pick up when you don't have any other political formula. Hence Europe has also seen anti-vaxers emerge, but they haven't meaningfully influence the rising right-wing parties there.
TL;DR: Trump exploited a hole on the American right, which no-one else could fill because the US doesn't really have a native right-wing ideology or movement; because he's literally one man, his ideology is conspiracy theorists and his movement is grifters; the same thing's happening everywhere else, but there was already another ideology to fill it there.
And what exactly catastrophic happened in these countries in the elections? I will remind you, Russia's path to authoritarianism began when Western-oriented liberals decided that it was possible to sacrifice democratic mechanisms for the sake of reforms.
This analysis is correct as far as it goes, but also underemphasizes how much stupider "elites" have gotten since 2000. Quadrant IV has gotten a lot bigger because a lot of people who were in Q1 have gotten brainwormed by broader culture war issues.
The Author has left out wisdom as a factor which is both interesting and disappointing as both the "elites" and the lower level emotionally motivated herd lack it.
This blog often operates under the unspoken assumption that there is obviously one correct way to do politics, this one correct way to do politics is a type of socially Darwinist libertarianism, most elites are aware of this reality, and the problems in America consist of social and institutional barriers that prevent us from implementing this system. I think this underrates how many intellectual and social elites find extreme Darwinism to be unpalatable. Decent numbers of them might just be flatly unwilling to make the tradeoff where you throw the bottom 5-10% of the population to the wolves and in exchange more growth happens for everyone else. Because of this, it is not at all obvious to me that a political world made up of just intelligent and informed people would all converge to 'Richard Hanania's preferred policy proposals': it is just as plausible to me that some would nevertheless be Bernie/Warren style socialists, others might adopt policy beliefs like JD Vance's, so on and so forth.
Asking people why they believe things os not as useful as looking at predictive correlates among believers writ large. Rob Kurzban won this argument with your hero Bryan Caplan as far as I'm concerned when they debated the role of self interest in cultural grievances. Caplan had a pretty superficial understanding of self interest. Material, sure, but positional and what incentives underwrite cultural self interest.
Regarding tribal alliances with idiots who happen to agree with you:
In both politics and media we can make a four square based on agrees with you / understands you:
* Agrees with you / understands what you’re doing
* Disagrees with you / understands what you’re doing.
* Agrees with you / does NOT understand what you’re doing
* Disagrees with you / does NOT understand what you’re doing.
Folks who hate you based on incorrect premises are irritating. But the folks who like you, by accident, and doesn’t get you? They’re the followers who get you in trouble.
You literally can claim that your neighbor owes you that though. This is exactly what we did for 100 years and its why malaria, polio and measles were wiped out across the developed world. We're regressing to a politics of blood sacrifice. "I dont care what happens to your immune-compromised child" is ideological cancer and should be stamped out ferociously.
In 2015 Milo Yiannopoulos glowingly remarked that Trump made politics cool and said it’s a good thing that everyone knows who the Secretary of State is now. I didn’t think the consequences were clear back then but I was also probably too young to realize
I find myself thinking of the ways in which the establishment stopped being worthy of trust. Because one of the reasons why people can stay disenged is because things basically work.
I'm thinking about China here. If you're living through decades of 8% year on year growth, it's going to be a hard sell to start protesting that government. Not impossible, but it's not like it is here.
I think there's a combination of traditional institutions genuinely failing in some ways, and populist outsiders desperately doing their best to tear them down.
I'd like a world where we have trustworthy, competent institutions. One of the things I care a lot about right now is education, and I am marinating in the vile incompetence and perhaps malice of our institutions on that front. I get why people are furious. And I think the people inside these institutions lost a necessary fear, and became decadent.
I considered myself right-wing because I asserted objective reality, and not NewAge-lefty ideas like reality as a social construct or "you create your own reality." Now the Party of Trump says "truth isn't truth" and says "the reality-based community" as a pejorative.
Quadrant III isn't irrelevant though. A huge chunk of them do vote, and when they do, they're running a crude but genuinely functional evaluation: is the economy doing well, does the person in charge seem competent, is the world on fire. That's where Wlezien's "thermostatic" model of public opinion comes from. When policy moves too far left, the public drifts right. When it moves too far right, they drift back. The low-information voter is the main carrier of that signal.
This actually strengthens your case for democracy in a way you're underselling. You say democracy is "fine" because the masses are passive and elites steer them, but that's a pretty fragile version of the argument. The stronger version is that Quadrant III is responsive in broadly sensible ways. They don't know what's in the infrastructure bill. They don't care about ideological fights. They just register whether things feel like they're going well or badly, and shift accordingly. And that works precisely because they don't have developed political views and don't follow the daily content war.
Which also clarifies why Quadrant IV is actually destructive rather than just annoying. The problem isn't that dumb people started participating. Dumb people were always participating, as Quadrant III voters, and that was fine. The problem is they switched from the thermostatic mode (judge by outcomes, punish apparent incompetence, and don't vote much) to the ideological-entertainment mode (judge by tribal loyalty, consume politics as content, vote more often). They moved from a system where their lack of information didn't matter because the heuristics were more outcome-tracking, into one where the heuristics are identity-tracking.
This is AI-generated. In case others don't find it obvious: https://www.pangram.com/history/91d8222c-ae8e-4e2a-86b1-ac9a05b227f3?ucc=UTQ9iVcpTkc
Which isn't to say it's a bad comment - I found it insightful. That in itself is interesting to me. It seems to be the most-liked comment at the moment. Maybe one day soon there will be a "get Claude's take" button at the bottom of articles.
"This actually strengthens your case for democracy in a way you're underselling."
That is soooo ai.
The comment is kinda insightful but I cant shake the dishonestly of posting under an account name and presenting as a human
I am a big misanthrope and am absolutely here for arguments that large chunks of the population are too dumb to be involved in the political process. The problem I have with this argument, though, is that there's clearly a pretty substantial chunk of crazy elites as well. Contained within the conservative movement, and staffing the Trump administration now, are a large number of absolutely radicalized rightwing pseudo-intellectuals, people who think Curtis Yarvin is deep, etc. (In fact, Hanania has written about their pathologies at length!) I view them as much more dangerous than the large mass of clearly dumb people on the street- they're organized, more competent, clearly have the levers of power at the moment, etc. Social movements are always composed of a small number of radicalized intellectuals, never the proletariat.
Antivax is a great example of this- yes, there was always a small minority of dumb antivaxxers. But conservative elites & influencers pushing this stuff in the last 6 years has greatly increased antivax sentiment among the large population of Average Conservative-Leaning Guy On The Street. The antivax crowd has grown dramatically specifically due to crazy elites, not the other way around.
I find this a much more difficult problem to solve
Yeah, of course there's internecine disagreement within Quadrant I, smart MAGAs and such. But I think that the politics of smart MAGAs are - despite their individual intelligence - nonetheless of disproportionate appeal to Quadrant IV. Curtis Yarvin himself (as one example) is obviously smart, as are most of his really devoted followers. But Moldbug-ism/neoreaction, as it manifests as a practical political program, appeals to Quadrant IV much more than Quadrants I and II. Trump tees them up by making Quadrant IV so large - without that context, Quadrant I MAGA wouldn't have the voting power to be influential.
But I feel like the engine driving them via audience capture is still the masses. JD Vance used to be normal.
As for Yarvin, I don't know how influential he is on his own. Would he be this popular if not for the furnace of traditional racists and conspiracy theorists? Its possible he is the post-rationalization for smart people's beliefs rather than the actual engine
Try to be sanguine about the anti-vax movement. To the rest of us who want to get vaccinated, it doesn't really matter. If 50,000 unvaccinated children get measles, who cares? Only a few will get really sick or die, and almost certainly none of them are our vaccinated kids. (In the rare child who gets measles despite being vaccinated, the disease is invariably mild.) And if a few do die, then their deaths may convince parents that, hmm, maybe measles vaccine was a good idea. Or it was God's will that her child died. Either way, I don't care. Do you?
Ditto for other vaccine-preventable diseases like polio, tetanus, and diphtheria. Your personal protection comes from being vaccinated yourself and is not materially affected by the vaccination choices of anybody else. And for diseases that are only modestly preventable by vaccination, like influenza and Covid, even more so. Modest protection is just not robust enough to have much impact on how an outbreak spreads. But you might get less severe disease yourself if you are vaccinated, so go for it.
Much is made of herd immunity, that if almost everyone is vaccinated, then disease doesn't spread even to those few unvaccinated. Which is true. But the point is that it is even better to get vaccinated yourself, and not worry about falling herd immunity from the unvaccinated. There will be a few children who can't get vaccinated with live-virus vaccines (like measles) whose parents have to be vigilant if an outbreak occurs among the unvaccinated. The sad truth is that the antivaxxers don't care about that unvaccinatable child and aren't going to get theirs vaccinated just to protect him. Hard lesson in human nature, but that's what we are as a species. You can't claim that your neighbour owes you a duty of protection in the form of accepting vaccination....or much else, frankly.
Of all the trouble that can be blamed on the Quad IV dumb right, anti-vax is right near the bottom of the list in importance.
It's a good enough theory, I think, to explain what's happening on the bottom.
It probably doesn't give enough attention to the top. What causes elites to be good or bad, involved or uninvolved? Aside from that brief comment on Obama and Macron.
I guess you could say it is encouraging to elites, and tends to promote better behavior, when a political vision is offered that combines a genuinely positive vision for the common good with economic rationality.
When politics is nakedly cynical, that only breeds more cynicism. When one party or the other is behaving irrationally, elites will work to stop it out of self-interest, but without someone supplying a positive vision, that's as far as it goes. E.g. California's proposed confiscatory wealth tax, which has "activated" figures like Sergey Brin, but not in a way that seems supportive of any vision broader than "stop confiscatory wealth taxes".
A criticism made of Silicon Valley -- and perhaps more broadly of our contemporary globalized/cosmopolitan elite class -- is that it lacks a sense of noblesse oblige or connection to the nation. It is less interested in building up institutions and amenities in the cities where it finds itself, because it recognizes all connections to geography as temporary and fungible.
I guess you could just dismiss this as a stupid populist talking point, but it seems to come across as a legitimate difference in how elites have come to operate over time. You could perhaps include some observations from Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" here, how elites have physically separated themselves from the lower classes and ceased investing in common institutions. Which is individually rational, but the differences it creates lend fuel to the populist fire.
Does Hanania sort of cover the question of bad elites by saying:
"Stupid people will explicitly tell you what they’re angry about: vaccines, having to see brown people, women not knowing their place, gender non-conformity, pedophile conspiracies, etc. Populist-leaning intellectuals like to pretend that these are just excuses and the true source of pain is always material."
I take it to mean they are still badly motivated but intellectualize it
I would take this back even further. The growth of quadrant four began in the 90s with talk radio, and got even larger during the 2000s due to the growth of cable news, especially Fox News. The Republicans missed out on a bunch of Senate seats due to some bonkers nominees that wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without talk radio and Fox News.
Trump activating Quadrant 4 is an interesting explanation, but given the similar trends in Europe I'd suggest it's overdetermined.
In Western Europe, the rough pattern was that various centre-right parties moved notably to the left during the late 90s and early 2000s, largely to compete with centre-left parties moving towards the right after the fall of Keynsianism and/or the USSR. This created a gap in the market to their right, which was eventually (after much struggle) filled by the new right-wing nationalist parties (AfD, Reform, RN etc.). The centre of gravity in all these parties is a few rungs down the social ladder over the parties they replaced, which shows up in policy terms as being less market-oriented.
In the US, the Democrats also moved to the centre in the 90s. The Republicans then did likewise under Bush. They then had a similar struggle, which due to the US having primary elections was all intra-party. This originally manifested as libertarianism (Ron Paul), then a kind of nominal libertarianism combined with prole-signalling (Tea Party, Sarah Palin) before settling on Trump, who ditched the Libertarianism and replaced it with opposition to immigration, "bringing jobs back" and not much else.
I think the best explanation for the US taking a strange course through libertarianism and then settling on Trump is just that the US doesn't really have any indigenous right-wing political traditions. Europeans who want orderliness/wholesomeness/deference/industriousness have a post-fascist (RN in France and FdI in Italy have their roots in Vichy and Salo respectively) and European conservative movement to look to. American conservatism was never much more than soft-libertarianism, fundamentalist Christianity and opposition to liberalism, so there's no ideology for it to gravitate towards. There's also no infrastructure for the same reason.
My point here is that Trump+grifters became the dominant force on the right because no-one else really tried to fill that gap in the market. If Scott Walker or whomever had come out for reducing immigration, cracking down on crime/protestors and improving state capacity, he'd have filled the gap instead. He would have had a harder time though, as he'd need to have built a new ideology and movement to work with; Trump+grifters' advantage is they can motivate and co-ordinate people without a coherent intellectual framework, and build such organisation as they need on the fly out of lunatics and grifters.
The reason I think all of this isn't the "box 4 expanding" point is that most of the right-wing voters who've gone over to Trump's parents were just as involved with politics and happy to vote for Reagan. Trump has undoubtedly won over a few bottom-of-the-barrel types (e.g. his over performance with male rednecks and hispanics) with his WWE-adjacent persona, but these aren't the mass of his support, don't win him primaries (both his own and his endorsees) and aren't very connected to his grifter-network (Jésus the wrestling-watching roofer isn't working at the State Department). The conspiracy-theorists are more perennial everywhere, but are to ideology what the grifters are to organisation; they're the cheapest thing you can just pick up when you don't have any other political formula. Hence Europe has also seen anti-vaxers emerge, but they haven't meaningfully influence the rising right-wing parties there.
TL;DR: Trump exploited a hole on the American right, which no-one else could fill because the US doesn't really have a native right-wing ideology or movement; because he's literally one man, his ideology is conspiracy theorists and his movement is grifters; the same thing's happening everywhere else, but there was already another ideology to fill it there.
Western world is just coming to grips with this.
Anyone studying India, Turkey or Russia always knew how irrational the electorate and how disastrous elections could be.
And what exactly catastrophic happened in these countries in the elections? I will remind you, Russia's path to authoritarianism began when Western-oriented liberals decided that it was possible to sacrifice democratic mechanisms for the sake of reforms.
This analysis is correct as far as it goes, but also underemphasizes how much stupider "elites" have gotten since 2000. Quadrant IV has gotten a lot bigger because a lot of people who were in Q1 have gotten brainwormed by broader culture war issues.
The Author has left out wisdom as a factor which is both interesting and disappointing as both the "elites" and the lower level emotionally motivated herd lack it.
This blog often operates under the unspoken assumption that there is obviously one correct way to do politics, this one correct way to do politics is a type of socially Darwinist libertarianism, most elites are aware of this reality, and the problems in America consist of social and institutional barriers that prevent us from implementing this system. I think this underrates how many intellectual and social elites find extreme Darwinism to be unpalatable. Decent numbers of them might just be flatly unwilling to make the tradeoff where you throw the bottom 5-10% of the population to the wolves and in exchange more growth happens for everyone else. Because of this, it is not at all obvious to me that a political world made up of just intelligent and informed people would all converge to 'Richard Hanania's preferred policy proposals': it is just as plausible to me that some would nevertheless be Bernie/Warren style socialists, others might adopt policy beliefs like JD Vance's, so on and so forth.
Asking people why they believe things os not as useful as looking at predictive correlates among believers writ large. Rob Kurzban won this argument with your hero Bryan Caplan as far as I'm concerned when they debated the role of self interest in cultural grievances. Caplan had a pretty superficial understanding of self interest. Material, sure, but positional and what incentives underwrite cultural self interest.
https://pleeps.org/2015/01/12/sexual-politics-and-self-interest/
Regarding tribal alliances with idiots who happen to agree with you:
In both politics and media we can make a four square based on agrees with you / understands you:
* Agrees with you / understands what you’re doing
* Disagrees with you / understands what you’re doing.
* Agrees with you / does NOT understand what you’re doing
* Disagrees with you / does NOT understand what you’re doing.
Folks who hate you based on incorrect premises are irritating. But the folks who like you, by accident, and doesn’t get you? They’re the followers who get you in trouble.
You literally can claim that your neighbor owes you that though. This is exactly what we did for 100 years and its why malaria, polio and measles were wiped out across the developed world. We're regressing to a politics of blood sacrifice. "I dont care what happens to your immune-compromised child" is ideological cancer and should be stamped out ferociously.
Another article where an "intellectual" despises and stigmatizes his own people, and then wonders why no one wants to vote for him.
In 2015 Milo Yiannopoulos glowingly remarked that Trump made politics cool and said it’s a good thing that everyone knows who the Secretary of State is now. I didn’t think the consequences were clear back then but I was also probably too young to realize
I find myself thinking of the ways in which the establishment stopped being worthy of trust. Because one of the reasons why people can stay disenged is because things basically work.
I'm thinking about China here. If you're living through decades of 8% year on year growth, it's going to be a hard sell to start protesting that government. Not impossible, but it's not like it is here.
I think there's a combination of traditional institutions genuinely failing in some ways, and populist outsiders desperately doing their best to tear them down.
I'd like a world where we have trustworthy, competent institutions. One of the things I care a lot about right now is education, and I am marinating in the vile incompetence and perhaps malice of our institutions on that front. I get why people are furious. And I think the people inside these institutions lost a necessary fear, and became decadent.
I considered myself right-wing because I asserted objective reality, and not NewAge-lefty ideas like reality as a social construct or "you create your own reality." Now the Party of Trump says "truth isn't truth" and says "the reality-based community" as a pejorative.