Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time:
> Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local. The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations. Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. Our current structure, with a homogenous federal government and nationwide corporations arose against the backdrop of that unity.
What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. Aside from maybe California, our individual states remain vastly less fractious than the nation as a whole. Here in Maryland, for example, our Republican governor has an approval rating over 70% in both rural and urban areas. That's not because the state doesn't have ideological diversity--a third of the state voted for Trump. But the extremes are compressed compared to the nation as a whole--Baltimore isn't San Francisco but neither is Carroll County rural Alabama. Not only that, it's hard to get folks in Carroll County worked up about Baltimore they way they get worked up about San Francisco, and vice versa.
This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that things can be done one way in one place and another way in another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not to.
Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified accross an entire country.
I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease. Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in an emergency.
Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that. Maybe what you mean is simply that humans act tribally, and most of the traditional tribe proxies (clubs, churches, etc.) have weakened or died off in modern society so we are left only with borderless ideologies as tribal allegiances.
>Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that.
That's too reductionist. Ultimately "humans" do it, like ultimately atoms do chemical interactions, but there are absolutely "group dynamics", they have been studied quite a lot, and an "individual" in a group context can operate totally different (and has different options, tradeoffs, etc) than an individual alone.
A very basic example: a human can forget X.
A group, on the other hand, has a collective memory (institutional memory), and even if an individual forgets, it takes many individuals forgetting to erase something.
Groups absolutely have an emergent consciousness, whether it is based on consensus or tyranny. Even a "human self" is ultimately a symbolic, higher-order complex formed from separate, often competing cognitions. In a very similar way, a group forms a mind and thinks, even if only one person is calling the shots: your conscious awareness will likely tend towards the cognitions created by your core beliefs, but that doesn't mean the others aren't there. They're just less conscious.
No. Groups process things, but you must frame your question in terms of things you can measure about a group.
An individual is a system; using your own logic it is inappropriate to talk about how a human feels. One must talk about each individual neuron and cell.
That's a very reductive take on what OP said. We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit. Individual=Indivisible.
You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.
OTOH if what you're saying is that large groups of people can tend to share the same psychoses, well, that's a totally different statement.
>We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit.
Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.
In particle-terms, a single atom can't be a crystal.
Or a living organism.
But there are absolutely things that happen at the level of crystal forms or living organisms, etc, that don't happen at the single atom level.
>You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.
> Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.
Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual. Population, for instance.
The crystal analogy, again, isn't helpful because we're talking about social science, not physics.
>Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual
An individual cannot exhibit groupthink without a group. They also can't have in-group bias without a group. Both important properties in group dynamics.
Roles and positions within a group are similar to the "crystal example" as well, with groups forming particular patterns under specific pressures, patterns impossible to the individual (e.g. an individual is not a "protest march" or a political party).
Collectivism, by definition, requires the use of force against people who aren’t complaint with the “collective”, so it requires violence.
It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building these large, dysfunctional political systems is because taking responsibility is hard, and most people don’t want to put in the effort.
You can absolutely have voluntary collectivism where you simply do not do things unless everyone agrees upon them. This works best in small or medium sized groups and probably does not work for large groups, but your post reads like you think collectivism always necessitates violence and that simply isn’t true.
>> And what do you do if someone disagrees with the crowd? How do you force him without coercieon? (hint those two words are synonyms).
I think as the parent poster was saying, this is possible with smaller groups. I think the best example would be townships in the US. Different townships decide on the level of tax and investing (especially into school systems.) Then, individuals self-select themselves into groups by choosing where to live.
I have friends upset about how not all schools are "top-tier" schools. I quote "top-tier" as it is in the eye of the beholder what that means. The thing is, not everyone wants their kids to have 5hrs of homework a night. Nor does everyone want to pay 20k+ in annual property taxes. Some would rather home-school or send their kids to private or parochial schools.
People often achieve this by joining a township that agrees with their appetites in spending and other political choices.
Alright. It is a township then. I refuse to go by the collective will. What happens next if violence is not an option and private property is respected?
In general, you have the same three choices you have in any other situation where you don't like what's going on: loyalty, voice, or exit.
In the first, you decide to accept the general will in order to maintain your individual credit, hoping that by cooperating on this occasion you encourage people to encourage with you later. Alternatively, you can protest the decision, hoping in doing so to encourage your fellow townspeople to change their mind, or to raise the reputation cost to them of proceeding down that route. And if you don't like that either, you can leave (highly visibly or otherwise).
Not all collective decision-making processes are coercive, either, FWIW. There are systems built on unanimity where your issue doesn't even arise: if you dislike the decision of the other group members enough then you can veto the decision. This creates other issues (and doesn't scale very well) but it does happen.
You never leave your property and live a happy life in solitude there until you die of boredom or starvation. Everybody is happy to not have to interact with you anymore.
Now stop bringing up absurd examples. Just living in a state exposes you to state violence, e.g. for not obeying the (tax) law.
If you wanted a realistic example of non-violent society, there are only few, mostly small remote tribes in deep jungle. Not surprisingly, those are very collectivist societies. The standard response to repeated badly non-conforming behavior in such societies is eviction from the community. Yes, that can be done non-violently.
I think the person meant about how the few options available actually come to existence: how are they come to be the ones that would allow the person to pick one over the other? Is it common sense, is it because it was decided this way.. How?
I think there are a lot of options. Across US states, counties, and townships, for example, there is a full spectrum of political positions literally w/r/t how money is collected (or not) and spent (or not)
I gave you an answer. You can suck it up, complain, or leave. And yes, those choices are unpleasant.
If this was supposed to be a 'actually it all comes down to the threat of violence' gotcha then, sure - if you insist on your property rights, don't pay your taxes and then decide to fight the bailiffs you're going to have a bad time. Sorry.
You did not answer - you listed my options and I was asking for the reaction of the collective. Because I know that functional illiteracy is becoming a serious problem, I'll do my best to help you: "How exactly are they going to limit my options to those, what are they going to do specifically?"
Specifically, the township would put a property tax lien on your property. Eventually, the liens would pile up and your property would have so many liens you'd have no value left in your house. Then the township would take you to court to enforce their right to collect the judgements. At that point, you'd most likely be forced to move out. The township would sell your home to recover the tax liens and judgements. A sheriff would forcibly remove you from your home in such cases.
Presumably, you could buy another home in the same township, and go thru all the above processes again. OR you could choose one of the original options given by a parent post:
You will starve as people refuse to provide you food, or allow you to use collective infrastructure, unless you leave. Your property will then become collective property.
Depending on the scenario, potentially nothing.
There are certainly times and topics where people can break from the collective, with no hard feelings or repercussions on either side.
In rural areas, this is typically how it works. Laws are more of suggestions, and unless you are causing a big problem for someone you are likely to be left alone.
While the “ism” suggests an ideology rather than an attribute of a real world society, what you describe is the essential balance every society needs to strike between the group and the individuals, and so you find jail and fines as coercion across a wide variety of countries and systems.
As a native English speaker myself, I urge you to get into etymology and understand socius and collective and community and thereby inoculate yourself against a weird strain of anti logic parading as American political discourse and often used by folks who know better sponsored by the federalist society and Cato institute and such… typically for lowbrow crowd appeal.
No society, by definition, is free from a collective aspect.
If you define collectivism is group activity enforced by violence vs voluntarism being group activity not enforced by violence then this entire discussion is a word game and a waste of time.
You can have voluntary collectivism. This is where everyone works to find agreement with the group as a matter of course, but only proceeds if that agreement is found. You might find this kind of management in a collectively owned business for example.
You’re missing the point. You don’t force anyone. If someone doesn’t want to do the thing, you don’t make them. You find a different way to accomplish your goals.
It would be possible to simply give up on the collectivism if someone disagrees and can't be persuaded otherwise. This of course limits where such collectivism can be found, but examples of this kind of collectivism do exist.
Another hint: coercion is not necessarily direct violence.
Capitalism is almost completely coercive and controlling, but direct violence is mostly reserved for minorities and for war adventures in distant countries.
At home it's coercive through financial violence (especially income restriction and forced debt), extreme economic apartheid, and overt and covert behaviour modification narratives in the various media.
"The crowd" is very much not in charge of any of this, but is persuaded that it is.
Arguably all of this is better than a more overtly dictatorial system where any form of dissent attracts direct violence. But it's not necessarily less coercive - just less obvious. And more efficient.
You can scale that back and have collective systems which rely on a tradition of consensus. It's not even all that unusual on a smaller scale. Teams/groups make decisions, some people disagree, but when consensus is reached everyone works towards the same goals even if they have misgivings.
This works if you allow feedback, goal monitoring, and resets so the system is responsive and self-correcting. But it also requires all participants to be rational, reasonably intelligent, non-sociopathic, and capable of adult decision making.
Which is why it doesn't work at scale. Only about half the population - at best - has those abilities, and as soon as your group includes at least one sociopath they will destroy that dynamic and replace it with a toxic one which relies more on coercion than consensus.
Unconscious people being taken by an ambulance to the hospital. The falsely accused needing legal representation and to pay a bail bondsman to get out of prison.
Do those examples work for you for people being physically punished for refusing to take on debt? Because I'm also happy to include sick people who need medical care and people who need money for food/heat/shelter/clothiers as being punished physically for refusing to take on debt by being deprived of those things
Punishment goes beyond physical means. You have the choice between poverty, or debt, which is definitely a form of coercion. Coercion is the use of a power differential to make someone act against their interests, physical force is not necessary.
Humans are collectivist by nature. It's why we've survived for so long and formed societies. People have to be taught to be divided which is why so much work has to be put into keeping things that way (ideology, class, race, ethnicity).
Violence comes in when one small privileged group wants to maintain power.
It's the same with any system. Private ownership requires the use of force against people who aren't complaint with the idea that they shouldn't own things instead, so it requires violence.
Also, by definition, anarchist collectivism has no strong central authority. People who aren't compliant probably shouldn't be living in an anarchist collective in the first place, but choice of social/economic system is sadly not granted as an option. In so much of the world today, people are forced to live under capitalism, like it or not. And people claim that this is "freedom"
“Small government types” are a fraud. That stuff is just chum for the masses.
Wedge issues like guns, abortion, etc are designed to break traditional democratic constituencies from the herd. Catholic priests were leaders of socialist revolutions in Latin America. In the United States, some catholic bishops were in favor of child separation due to abortion.
I think you’ve got this backwards. Social and cultural issues—different people’s conception of how to preserve freedom, when life begins, how to socialize their children, God, etc.—are always important to people and always have been. What precipitated the independence war that created my country was a language movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement
It’s the insistence on ideological uniformity on these fundamental issues that creates the “wedge” between people who might otherwise cooperate on relatively mundane economic issues.
That's a Republican narrative, not really backed up by any sound historical analysis. Whereas creation, nurture and development of wedge issues is a standard right wing tactic across the world. Be it love-jihad in India, miscegenation in USA, jewish hatred in nazi Germany or recognition of Ahmediyas as muslims in Pakistan. It incentivizes voters to vote on ideological lines while ignoring/ letting politicians/wealthy industries get away with looting public monies and resources, legally or illegally.
Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India. Because these were never nurtured and developed as wedge issues by BJP. Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians. Absolutely no one gives a shit about abortions or who does what, (except for the government preventing female infanticide). Whether right/left wing they consider abortions as personal business of the woman/man involved. This topic has not been nurtured as a wedge issue because it doesn't align with the BJPs wedge issue- presence of muslims/Christians in society.
I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections .
Are there any legitimate wedge issues in your opinion, or is just everything artificially made up?
Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.
Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.
There are legit issues, and wedge issues aren’t necessarily bullshit.
But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere, frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag.
In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mostly bullshit) memories of how great great grandpa fed the family shooting turkeys with his flintlock, then fought some redcoats for freedom. Then they hard pivot to why you need a concealed carry pistol to stop wild Mexicans from raping your daughter. It’s a really effective argument because it links the gun, crime, immigration, abortion, etc. Then after you spend this money, the liberals are gonna take your guns, so buy more.
The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. Progressive voters care about everything, but the get out the vote machines are more moderate.
To add a counterpoint - it seems to me the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from. When you take money from Bloomberg or Soros you agree to be antigun. This is not something that is controversial to say, Bloomberg and Soros are very proud of it. They directly inject vast sums of money into local elections to force in anti-gun candidates, and they have been very successful at it.
Despite your own personal viewpoints guns are very popular in the United States among both parties.
> the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from
From a perspective of a country where gun controls are far stronger, this idea that democrats are "antigun" seems hilariously partisan. Democrats only seem to be proposing modest gun controls compared to Republicans.
What do you define as "most of their funding"? What percentage of Democrat funding comes from Soros or Bloomberg?
Agreed. Urban democrats drive the anti-gun stuff. I’ve belonged to the same gun club since I turned 13.
I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.
What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.
> The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues.
That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, they voted in favor of California’s 2008 ban on same sex marriage. (Back then, they overwhelmingly opposed same sex marriage.) There’s a fair argument that what pushed the referendum over the top was very high Black turnout because Obama was on the ballot.
Non-whites vote democrat for different reasons than whites. For them, issues like civil rights, immigration rights, religious freedom for minorities, etc., are often dispositive of other issues. And insofar as many are immigrants, they don't feel ownership over the broader culture. My parents vote Democrat and view these social and cultural issues as being between white Americans. That works both ways--if Democrats supported outlawing abortion they might have some "population control"-type objections, but really wouldn't care because they'd never accept abortion in their own circle anyway.
If these “wedge issues” are manufactured and inconsequential, I’m sure democrats would be happy to go along with the republican positions on abortion, etc., these issues so we can focus on the important economic issues, right?
> Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India.
I said social and cultural issues are important to people—the specific social and cultural issues that cause disagreement obviously different between countries. Guns are a flashpoint in America because there are lots of people like my wife whose family history involves guns. Her ancestors fought in the American revolution and used guns to secure independence. They used guns when crossing the continent to settle the frontier. They used guns to protect themselves and hunt long before there was police officers and grocery stores anywhere nearby. All of this stuff is part of their cultural identity.
Obviously that specific issue isn’t relevant in India because it’s been fully settled for thousands of years. But the conflict between Hindus and Muslims similarly involves cultural identity.
> Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians.
So your example of how cultural and social issues aren’t important to people is to point out the conflict between Hindus and Muslims? Don’t you see how that parallels the conflicts in America between Christians and secularists?
And if you think religion is an inconsequential “wedge issue”—I’m sure those Muslims and Christians will be willing to conform to what the Hindus want, right?
> I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections.
Yeah but why did they do that? It was because East Pakistan was a different cultural and ethnic group (Bengali) than west Pakistan. Bangladeshi nationalism was sparked by the language movement, where Bengalis began to think of themselves as a distinct people with a different culture and language.
My mom edited an anthology of books on the Bangladeshi independence war. It takes up an entire row on a shelf at home. I lament I can’t read Bangla script but I’ve picked up a bit by osmosis.
Issues trivial enough for your opponent to disarm by ceding them without society harming consequences make poor wedges. A maximally appropriate wedge is one in which you take a harmful extremist view and present it as righteous without dealing with the results of actually fully getting your way.
Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position. We already have long since arrived at the compromise position of making it vastly more expensive and challenging by forcing people to travel substantial distances to few clinics with substantial expensive resources to get services their insurance wont cover to mostly take a few pills. This helpfully leaves them open to public shaming and rebuke.
We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison.
They by any measure got what one would consider substantially their way along with a sharp per capita abortion rate decrease.
It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate. In fact it would even be harmful to conservatives because it would drastically increase turnout if indeed it could be achieved over the will of the people.
"We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison."
This is an interesting topic. The two questions I have, seem to be difficult for people to answer and have them be consistent in other areas of our law and culture.
1) What defines a human life from a logical perspective?
This one seems difficult. For example, you seem to think that if one cannot survive without medical treatment that they don't count as a life or are not worth protecting, yet this is inconsistent with our laws on things like duty of care to special needs individuals, children, or incapacitated people.
2) When is it acceptable to take, or not save, a life?
I would say that it’s human life at or shortly after conception. It’s alive, it’s a distinct organism, and it’s genetically human. If we found a blastocyst on Mars we’d say “human life found in Mars!” It’s in a stage of the human lifecycle where it’s completely dependent on the mother, but that doesn’t negate either the human part or the life part.
So I think the real debate is over when it’s acceptable to kill a human at an early stage of development. That is fundamentally a moral compromise, in the same way that e.g. the law of self defense is a moral compromise. Nothing in science says a fetus has a “right to life” just as nothing in science says anyone has a “right to bodily autonomy.”
I think partisans and ideologues try to take this issue to extremes based on principle, but I think most people (especially mothers) have a mushy view. They know miscarriages happen naturally in the early weeks and so support some abortion right. They support exceptions for life of mother or fetal abnormalities even in later stages. But for they’ve also seen ultrasounds showing something that looks a lot like a baby at 15 weeks and aren’t ideological enough to think you should be able to kill that without a really good reason.
Here's the funny thing about abortion laws. The Democrats have had a majority multiple times since Roe v Wade or even Casey and they have consistently failed to codify Roe into law. Why? Because they really like the money they get for threatening a woman's right to choose, too.
Democrats have indeed codified Roe into law in states where they can. Federal law doesn't really work that way though, which is probably why Roe was recognized through penumbras of the constitution or however they would say it. It all gets a bit silly and pompous when we take it to the priests of the law in funny robes, but the practical results of Roe were an almost perfect compromise and undoing it does not seem like a good idea to me.
> Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells
I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was.
A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be killed for another couple of months still, has a face, hands and feet, finger prints, etc. They can suck their thumb and have other human baby reflexes.
> which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position.
Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but the whole fixation with personal conscience, individual self determination, and the equal dignity of every individual—ideas that animate American social liberalism— also come from Protestant Christianity. Nobody is making amoral utilitarian arguments for or against same-sex marriage.
> It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate.
Incorrect. Over 65% of Americans would support making abortions illegal in all or most cases after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... The public opinion is basically closest to the Mississippi law that’s up before the Supreme Court: 15 weeks with exceptions for health of mother and baby. Incidentally, highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland have settled on 13-14 weeks as well.
But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?
People in California believe that all Americans including those who are unfortunate enough to live in Mississippi ought to have rights as well. In addition your poll doesn't quite say exactly what you think it does.
It actually doesn't say that most people believe abortion ought to be illegal after the first trimester. What it actually said is that 38% believe that it ought to be illegal in most cases. This is overwhelmingly the people who believe that we are violating the magical ghost that their god hath breathed into even a lump of cells. Also notably this is virtually the same demographic that literally believes the earth is 6000-10,000 years old.
Of the 61% who believe abortion should be legal 44% believe the first trimester ought to be the line. Another 12% think the second trimester ought to be the line and another 44% think birth ought to be the line.
There are two questions. Ought abortions happen outside extraordinary circumstances and where do we draw the line. If we have discerned that a woman has a right to an abortion it makes no sense to average or combine the people who think the line is at zero and the people who think the variable has a value and use that to set policy. Firstly because the average of undefined and an integer is undefined and secondly because that is a fucking terrible why to deal with something that actually has a scientific answer that being basing it on birth rendering it an independent person or brain development such that the fetus goes from having never been conscious in the first place to something more akin to sleep.
>Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.
Take it from the child of an Ahmedi who left Pakistan in 1986. When _you’re_ the wedge issue, you don’t have many other choices.
Exactly right. The wedge issue in India right now is not "imaginary friends". Its literally "Muslims should not be allowed to attend university and run businesses " vs "they should be allowed ".
Neither fingers nor sucking them make you human. What's in your womb at 13 weeks is much stupider than the mouse in a trap in your basement or what's on your sandwich.
Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.
It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.
The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.
These same people are only too happy see kids separated from parents and kept in cages. The non stop propaganda has lined them up to be deeply Christian, hate immigrants, blacks and the poor, distrust vaccines, trust ivermectin, love guns, hate abortions, hate green energy.
The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.
The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.
The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.
While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.
Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.
> But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?
Rephrasing - if X is a manufactured wedge issue then why is it a wedge issue? I think you manufactured an unintended tautology!
> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.
I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could, if it chose to).
If you weaken the power of the federal government (which ironically is what i interpret "increased federalism and localism" to mean), who deals with the titans?
> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon.
An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.
Regulatory capture is indeed a problem. But it's a hand-waving assertion that it's "much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured."
This sort of claim seems to me fundamentally rooted in some specific ideas about large human organizations, specifically of the governmental kind. One of the key ideas it requires to be true is that the corruption endemic to small-scale institutions (think your local mayor, perhaps (depending on your state) even your governor) will automatically apply to much larger scale institutions (such as those administered by the federal government).
I'm not going to deny that this could be true - it clearly could. But the change in scale, the change in mechanisms of influence that are required, the change in the possible side-effects of such corruption being uncovered ... these all point in the opposite direction, in my opinion.
Amazon and Walmart are not the victors in a game of regulatory capture. They are the beneficiaries of the election of senators, representatives, presidents and the appointments of judges who explicitly do not believe in much regulation. Even so, they are subject to more oversight than one of my local ranching families in NM, who can get a (former) governor to re-route millions of dollars in state & federal funding to a road they would prefer.
Corruption at all levels is far more "endemic" to large organizations than small ones. It's also less visible, because size correlates with a lack of transparency.
Don't agree. Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it. Finding that in an organization of 3 people is not always so hard; finding it in an organization of 30k people is almost impossible.
No it doesn’t. It only requires a small group to agree to be corrupt.
As the organization increases, you are more likely to find people who can band together to collude to corrupt some small corner of it. Number of corrupt candidates increases, number required does not.
Amazon only needs to lobby one federal legislature’s members and only need to battle one federal regulatory body. If all of the power were at the state levels, it would have to scale that up 50x.
There can be corruption at all levels without coordination.
Example: greed.
There is such a thing as unorganized corruption. Example, in lots of third world countries where their infrastructure and systems are so bad it breeds corruption. No need for a top down version of it.
But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.
Yes, I agree that you can see examples in some parts of the world and in some time periods (including today) where even uncoordinate corruption is very damaging to a society. But - and this is important given the context in which I started talking about this - it does not appear to be a pathway to regulatory capture nor the formation of giant corporations in the sense that was proposed up-thread, in which a powerful "federal" organization is used to enable such organizations to exist.
> But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.
Greed won't direct an organization in a unified direction, but that just exposes a vulnerability where an outside party can exploit the greed at an individual level to direct the organization in a unified direction of its choosing.
"Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it."
No such thing is required beyond the common stance of 'venal self-interest' regardless of organizational mandate. Without checks and balances (and penalties) you can get a loosely coupled "corruption" at all levels with little effort.
Even if we take this as true small, local governments are still large in aggregate and suffer the same problem. Fighting small town corruption is a trope for a reason. If anything decentralisation makes organisations less transparent (e.g. cell organisation for crime/spies/terrorists) because there is no common means to look into them.
British local government is notoriously corrupt and very few Brits pay much attention to it in comparison to national politics (partly because it’s not reported on in major news outlets). See for example Private Eye’s “rotten boroughs” column. So that would be one counterexample.
The corruption is so endemic in large organizations it becomes a necessary quality to even be a possible participant. This is very up front and visible in US federal government.
When I worked as a consultant at Home Depot's headquarters, they often sent out emails from the "Orange Voice" pushing employees to lobby their members of Congress on various bits of legislation and issues. What was very clear was that Home Depot absolutely hated each state having its own set of laws. Even worse were local laws. They wanted there to be just one government for them to lobby for their issues and when one state requires them to have some operational quirk such as customer accessible price scanners with printers attached, the first instinct is to find a way to get the feds to find a way to make that state requirement go away.
That's different and understandable. Everyone wants to have to comply with one set of regulations instead of one set of regulations plus fifty more additional sets of regulations (or more with counties/cities) that require additional effort to comply with and ensure the correct ones are complied with. Just the additional labor costs for lawyers must be real. Add to that the need to have special cash registers for one state, or other changes, and it gets pretty expensive. Hell, Home Depot would probably rather one national sales tax (regardless of whether it's higher or lower than the current national average) over the complexity of the current sales tax code. Just for the operational simplicity.
That would be a good theory if we didn't see a global rise of massive corporations. If we for a moment cynically argue this as a question purely of lobbying spend: Once your corporation makes profits measured in billions, it is relatively easy to have a large lobbying spend across many different governments.
One answer here is a huge number of small governments. At the level of one for each largeish city, to make lobbying spend prohibitively high. That sort-of works, in that it creates incredible amounts of friction. It, however, also hobbles trade and innovation to an incredible degree.
I don't see that as a good answer. Neither, I think, is one humongous centralized government - while it has the resources to outspend corporations, it concentrates inordinate power in a small number of hands. And if you're willing to assume that corporations will use money to solve problems (because that's kind of their whole point), there's a very small step from there to just buying a sufficient set of politicians.
You need regulations somewhat unified to enable commerce at anywhere close to the level the world currently experiences. You need a decentralized system to deal with power concentration. This is an inherent tension that I can't see how to resolve in the face of corporations that are essentially the peers of nation states.
> An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence.
> An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence.
I don't see what evidence there is of that. How does Walmart (specifically, since it was mentioned) benefit from federal government regulations in a way that gives them an advantage over other brick and mortars?
> one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist.
Is bigger government more able to do this? It already has the power it needs -- the legislature can outlaw undesirable corporate behaviors, the justice department can pursue litigation (including antitrust litigation), and federal courts can rule against unlawful behavior by these companies. I don't see how bigger further enables any of these goals.
The problem I see is that lobbying and corporate hobnobbing with government elites in Washington creates a friendship and unity between corporate elites and government that ought not to exist. (Exhibit A: Ajit Pai)
A merely bigger government concentrates unjust power at the top: power to dictate more of our lives and increase bureaucracy, not power to enact justice and protect liberty.
We need a better government, not a bigger one -- a government that enforces justice without corporate favoritism, enacts the will of the people through representation, and upholds and protects the US constitution.
Beggar thy neighbor policies require higher level coordination to escape. E.g. tax competition between states to attract large companies, which not only reduces public funds but also disadvantages smaller local companies, is hard to prevent without agreements between states, or policies at a superstate level.
Replace taxes with permission to pollute, or worker rights, or other regulations, if you don't see a problem with tax competition. The point is that competition in practice reduces the sovereignty of the population of smaller government units.
You need a government with enough heft to take on a corporation that has decided to ignore the law. If you think you can get heft via "better", go for it. History doesn't give me much reason to be optimistic.
"The problem with corruption, inefficiency and stupidity in government is corruption, inefficieny and stupidity, not government."
Governments have the monopoly on the use of legitimate force on their territory (and the means that go with it). Isn't that enough heft to go after any corporation?
Could you elucidate what you mean by "heft"? Sometimes I think people want a feeling of power over them (or others) without a clear sense of the mechanism or implications of that power.
It could be any of:
- more taxes
- more government employees
- more laws
- more law enforcement
- more bureaucracy
- more regulations
- more enforcement of regulations
- more military power
- more domestic espionage
- more foreign espionage
- martial law
- less democracy
I'd argue that having a better government does not imply more heft, but more efficiency and justice, without sacrificing democratic election and separation/limitation of powers.
Some of the most efficient governments in the world also lack proper separation and limitation of powers, which degrades personal freedom. Democracy that leads to freedom is an extraordinarily tough balancing act; early US founders recognized that and publicly called on almighty God to help and aid them in their efforts.
I don't understand how you can come to this conclusion? A small country is dependent on good relations, foreign investors and on and on and on. Even at best, the small country gets limited clout. What can a small country do against a multinational company or against the WTO etc etc
They can make an economic union and together make an ultimatum against the company. See EU, it works without creating a large centralized country like US did.
I can’t tell and I’m genuinely asking: are you suggesting we empower government to dispatch force against a private corporation? As in, the imaginary paperwork construct we all agree upon being an actual thing and accordingly empower with agency and a noun and a stock symbol? You want to park an Abrams in front of that thing and aim?
(On reflection, what’s interesting about my question here is how it’s simultaneously metaphorical and literal through absolutely no effort of mine. The idea itself made that happen, rather oddly.)
This phrase is frequently misunderstood, because people treat it as a truism about government, rather than the method by which to identify the government. It is not the case that the officially recognized government has a monopoly on violence. Rather, whichever group has a monopoly on violence is itself the government. If multiple groups can use violence, then there is no monopoly, and therefore no overarching government.
You need to change the incentives of the federal government (specifically the congress) to be in more in favor of localism. In 1900, senators were (at least partially) still appointed by state legislators and the local political parties held far greater control over their nomination process. Those mechanisms had their own issues with corruption and were replaced by more democratic processes, but they made members of congress far more beholden to local interests (particularly state and local elites.) In turn, you saw a lot more distrust of large national institutions and legislation to limit them. Almost all banks used to be local, for example, because of legislation strictly limiting branching.
So to answer the question of "who deals with the titans" the answer is "the federal government, but they do so because they are beholden to state and local governments/institutions/elites."
I'm not sure I see a path from where we are to making federal representatives more responsible to state institutions (my repeal the 17th amendment campaign never having gained much traction), but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You'll have to forgive me. I live in a small population state (NM). I trust my local politicians far less than I trust the 3 or 4 we send to DC. When I lived in a larger population state (PA) the situation wasn't much different.
The distrust of large national institutions is, IMO, a result of more than a century (or two!) worth of campaigning by the capital class to try to limit the belief in the virtues of the federal government. I consider the mere existence of this campaign (both overt and covert) to be another piece of evidence that the capital class regard the power of a strong federal government as a threat to their wealth and power. I also find it notable that I never hear anyone arguing for a stronger state government, but not odd because it fits with the general theme: rich people should be left alone to do whatever they want with the assets they control.
I've said many times here on HN that back in the 1960s there was widespread interest in a part of what was then called "operations research" that focused on how to improve the behavior of large human organizations whether they were governments or private. Sadly, that interest faded, and now we just accept private organizational malfunction without saying much, and government organizational malfunction by repeating conservative, "small government" tropes.
I have to agree. While I do think for most government local institutions are better... the federal government has done more for freedom and prevention of abuse than my state certainly has.
Living in the south it's very apparent that a weak federal government was a bad thing. Civil rights have to be mandated top down, history is the proof.
And I believe there is still sufficient party interest and government design to protect "state's rights".
Most federal programs are state/municipality implemented. Sure, the feds might stick rules to how money can be used, in order to prevent abuse, but that's a good thing.
Wanting a powerful federal government to take on Walmart and Amazon seems like burning your house down because it has mice in it. Yeah, you might have some work to do to get the mice under control, but you don’t need to give up your house to do it.
I don't see how that analogy fits unless you think government is dangerous by definition and cannot provide any sort of services or protections for its people. Weakening the federal government in the face of these large multinational corporations because you're afraid of the government flavored corruptions seems more akin to "burning your house down because it has mice in it" from where I stand.
Much like chemotherapeutics, I do think government is inherently dangerous to the people but also serves a critically important useful purpose. Accordingly, it should be carefully applied when needed and in the right dose and not applied systemically to every life situation.
a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). one read on GP is that we don’t need something this rigid for every coordination problem. time-limited and domain-limited agreements to which only some (large) subset of states agree could, possibly, accomplish the same things — perhaps with less political backlash in the process.
for example, state AGs band together in such a process pretty frequently.
EU membership is more fluid than US membership. and i’m not an expert on it, but my understanding of its origins is as an economic partnership first (promote a unified currency and compatible border regulations between member states). AFAIK the EU can’t declare war and has more limited funding/taxation options (e.g. rather than an individual income tax, the closest it can accomplish is a tax applied at the level of the member nation, and limited to 1.4% of GNP). that said, the US as a federal institution also started small and gained greater powers over time, so maybe this won’t be as significant as i assumed.
as for litigation, i thought it was the individual member states that were suing Big Tech. i thought the only role the EU itself played here was that of explicitly stating the conditions under which members can do such things.
With the highly mobile nature of society, the federal government should mostly be about ensuring the application/protection of federal rights through the country. Then the local can set the laws that work best for them.
The tough part is that additional laws restricting actions tend to interfere with the laws preserving freedoms. So the two tend to be at odds with each other and result in circuitous and controversial judicial reasoning to determine if the restriction violates a right or freedom.
> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon
Why not? You can’t ban a specific company from operating but if you want them to act or stop acting in a certain way pass a law. If Australia can make Amazon pay Goods and Services Tax so can any of the states. Oh wait, they did that already.
If they want to target a specific company for actions or inactions that are not generally illegal they can amend the constitution to make bills of attainder legal.
Because the value of a large company, rich in either jobs or donatable cash or both, is too significant to most states to risk losing, and going up against them does risk that loss.
By contrast, large US-founded companies are extremely unlikely to quit operating in the USA if the federal government takes actions they do not like.
California literally dictates the emissions standards for the US car market. Single states are already making multi-nationals comply with their rules and are much smaller than the federal government.
Do the numbers check out here? How does Amazon compare to Standard Oil divided by the relative sizes of the federal government? I’d guess that Rockefeller comes out way ahead.
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other factors but top-down power was important in the weakening of those structures.
I'm not necessarily for centralization, nor do I think our current system is good or has us on a healthy path by any means. I'm just not convinced stakes were lower in the early 20th century.
I don’t think there is any way to reconcile those things. If your primary concern is protecting individual rights in every corner of the country, you need centralization. And frankly you probably need to limit democracy as much as possible—which is what we did in the last several decades by having the Supreme Court take over many issues that other countries have decided by legislation.
But there’s no limiting principle to the above. You’d have more protection of individual rights in Europe if France could overrule Poland through undemocratic organizations like the ECHR: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That would probably trigger devastating political consequences, however.
At the end of the day you have to make a decision about how much you care about democracy and self determination versus individual rights. I don’t think that in 2022 we are striking the right balance on that.
No I mean this specific statement: "Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state."
During the period in the US where power was most abused by bureaucrats and executives, they were also extremely local to the people they were wielding that power against.
I'm not trying to figure out some personal-freedom-vs-collective-justice conundrum, I'm asking a very concrete question about whether the quoted statement is even true. In one highly notable case affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of americans and lasting for nearly a century, that wasn't the case. That calls the assertion into question, I think.
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
That can happen. But what also did happen is that the bureaucrats and executives with power of your life were also very much under the influence (and in some cases, direct control) of local (and non-local) wealth. That influence/control can be very hard or impossible to tackle with only local politics (history has shown this to be clearly the case, many, many times).
How do you reconcile a strong federal government with the fugitive slave act, the Dred Scott decision or the Patriot Act? The federal government is just as capable of making terrible policy as the states. But whereas a person can easily escape a state whose policies they find to be reprehensible, (you could literally move to a new state over a weekend) escaping the USA is not really an option for most.
I'm not trying to? Could you reread the question I'm asking up there? It's a very specific one. At no point am I trying to argue in favor of increased centralized federal power or whatever.
I'm pointing out an abuse of local power that doesn't seem to fit with the assertion that local power is less subject to abuse.
Personally I think neither centralization nor decentralization are themselves limits on power, and other constraints must be found and imposed.
Institutions are error correction. If more than a certain threshold percentage of the population is straight up violently racist, no amount of quality institutions can recover signal from that noise.
Suppose x% of people will vote to convict a black man no matter the evidence, and the remaining 1-x% have a y% chance of erroneously voting to convict irrespective of race. At what value of x do you expect 2/3rds of wrongful convictions to be black?
Got nerd-sniped hard by this. The basic question is simple; given a random person in the population, what are the values of x and y such that the chance that they will give a wrongful vote are 2/3? Obviously, we can see that y = ((2/3) - x)/(1 - x). A simple enough graph shows that the racist population would have to be surprisingly high to fulfill that condition; even a 20% die-hard "convict on race" population would still require the other 80% of people to similarly erroneously convict almost 60% of the time.
It becomes more interesting when we consider juries. Juries, as far as I know (not being American), require unanimous agreement to convict. A jury consists of 6-12 people. To find out if a jury will convict, we have to find the probability of every single person in that jury wrongfully convicting. The formula now is y = ((2/3)^(1/{6|12}) - x)/(1 - x). At this point, either x or y have to be very high for 2/3 of wrongful convictions to be black. Even when x = 66%, y still has to be above 80% for the 6-member jury to convict wrongfully that many times. This is, of course, assuming this is a perfectly mathematical scenario and we aren't dealing with real humans who will vote to convict because everyone else is doing so.
The error, then, is probably more due to humans being likely to fold their convictions under peer pressure than merely a high percentage of them being rabidly racist. If people adamantly voted their conscience in juries, and refused to be swayed by the deliberation of their fellow jurors, we would have many more hung juries and many fewer convictions.
I'll snipe you a bit harder. In the event of a hung jury, the case can be retried (aka the distribution resampled). Practically though, no prosecutor wants to redo the same case over and over. So its safe to assume that 2 hung juries is as good as charges dropped.
I'm glad you enjoyed this problem, both as a riddle and as a neat demonstration of how a societal system can be better (more fair, just) than the underlying society that builds it.
Really, though, things like this should be taught and demonstrated from k-12. A kindergartener can understand the cognitive dissonance when the Monty Hall problem is demonstrated, especially if an adult "cheats" repeatedly when they know the mechanics. After the big reveal, the kid knows the difference between 1 out of 2, and 2 out of 3. They'll play it smart by the time they hit third grade, and by graduation, they'll have an intuitive understanding of posterior probabilities.
Drug tests, statistical sampling used to validate polls, and misleading sales tactics would be neutered by a well informed, Bayesian thinking public.
Exponential thinking should be introduced early and feedback loops explained. If legislators could rationally deconstruct a problem such as racist false convictions they would be equipped to modify the systems they legislate to prevent or mitigate the damages implicit to reality-based statistics.
Prisons for profit would lose 80% or more of their fodder. The broken family, broken community cycle would be effectively ended.
And population. In 1900 California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Utah had like 2.5 mil people combined. 20 years earlier it was half that.
I don't think corporations had a smaller scope back then. Look up the Grange movement, trust busting and the progressive party. They were all responses to corporations having too much power, in fact control over many aspects of life and complete economic power over certain industries and groups of people. Government intervened, something which might not be possible right now.
Totally agree. Thinking social media is the cause of the current divide is naive. It's certainly a mean to make it evident. Perhaps a catalist. But it's certainly not the cause.
>The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations.
This sounds wrong. see railroad workers in the western states or mining towns in western PA or West Virginia. People literally had to fight paid soldiers their employers sent to control their lives. I'd say that's pretty huge scope.
I think this is close but I have an impression that local governance is poorly served by the internet. A lot of local news has collapsed, and people read severely centralized news from a few counties. The audience, therefore, of these sites in tremendous and heterogeneous, and they would rather focus on topics of common interest. So there may be nothing written whatsoever about your congressperson, but both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi have ice cream scandals.
During the 2016 election, when I had my ballot, I tried to just Google everything on there. The most alarming thing I noticed was the absolute lack of any press on the House of Representatives candidates. I had nothing to go on except a short biography of each candidate (in one article), and one of them had a YouTube channel of little substance.
In practice, so many of America’s problems, and so many problems that Americans are very conscious of, are local issues over which the president has little to no control. Zoning, rent, real estate, roads, education, policing. Locally governed, locally funded, locally hired.
But the local press is gutted. For any of these topics, the audience is microscopic compared to “the president dumped feed in the Khoi pond”.
Here's an idea: the single-topic, short-lived political party.
Imagine a political party created to achieve one focused accomplishment, and then literally dissolved once it's been achieved.
The more bipartisan support the accomplishment has, the better. Say a political party whose primary focus is to get term limits for members of the US Congress, a topic with broad bipartisan support [1].
People of all political persuasions could join from across the country. The people in this party might differ in major ways, but they agree strongly on this one topic.
Maybe they sign a legal contract to bind them to both vote in favor of term limits if they're elected, and to elect to bring that up to a vote on the floor of US Congress until it's passed. Some consequence would have to exist I suppose. But with that would come the small, focused party's endorsement, and resources from its supporters.
Interesting! I didn't realize the group that started this was a political party which largely went away. But this approach was mostly adopted by the mainstream Tory party in the UK, correct?
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
This statement is ambiguous. I see two obvious interpretations:
1. Differences in worldview are less important when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
2. Differences in worldview are smaller when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
In Illinois there's a pretty major divide between Northern and Southern IL. A lot of people draw that line well north of Springfield.
I would say it broadly follows what some are calling the "Rural-Urban divide" - certainly the suburban areas are included. With some wrinkles of course. DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".
> DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".
Well, one of those towns has a 16000-student public research university with over 1000 doctoral students and participates in the management/operation of FermiLab. The other one is at the junction of two railroad lines, surrounded by farms and approximately the same population over the last 100 years. I would expect that they feel extremely different, and that's not a bad thing at all!
States can be very heterogeneous and divided. It largely depends on the topic. There is a lot of resentment towards the populated areas by those in the rural areas when it come to things like gun laws. Right now, they have a republican govenor who they might feel they can trust to veto certain things, but in general the rural areas feel their voice isn't heard on that subject and are instead subjected to the will of the urban area.
I would like to see the source where the MD governor has a 70% approval rating in urban areas. My guess is that many of those areas are ones that voted for him, not against him.
In rural PA, it's been a running a joke that the state should just have NJ annex Philly since it exhibits large political influence on the rest of the state and their wishes tend to align with the policies of NJ.
>What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.
There are problems with Haidt's analysis and your proposed solution. The idea that society has become fractious because of technology masks a real division that has always existed among people. There's always been in-groups and out-groups which often fight each other with the in-groups usually dominating all levels of society within a given region. For example, in "red states" LGBT folks often have to keep their identity a secret or at very least pretend to bow to the dominant group which in theory gives them some protection. Of course, this is an illusion as many trans and gay/lesbian/bi folks find themselves murdered more so in hostile regions than not despite passing or hiding their sexual orientation.
What social media has done is give out-groups such as LGBT folks a means to voice their views, share their lives, and basically live as if the dominating groups don't have a say in living. This has basically made in-groups furious because in the past, a simple act of lynching would bring such out-groups to heel but now with the power of having mutual aid across the internet through GoFundMe, random meetups, and chat apps like Discord such acts of physical and structural violence don't stick as well. A family in a rural red state can't force their gay son to act straight when they can safely move out to another city even before the age of majority thanks to friends online paying for their bus ticket. No more can the local church lock down minorities in their community when they can up and leave thanks to social media connecting folks to others that have the means to help.
Essentially, society is breaking up because the means to unify via absence of freedom to flee local tyrannies and brutalities has been diminished greatly. It's not that people are experiencing the equivalent of the tower of babel from the Bible, it's that people are recreating their own colonial ventures to far away lands to avoid persecution much like religious minorities did when coming to North America. Instead, they're just fleeing to other states or countries with friends.
This is why one faction of conservatives "want to reduce [the federal government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Progressives see that notion as dangerous because they consider the government as an essential tool for solving serious problems that ruin the lives of real people. But their successes will be short lived if an expansion of government power leads to a long term disintegration of our country. Perhaps we would be better off just letting some problems fester instead of forcing government solutions.
Is reducing the federal government to that size not committing to the long term disintegration of our country? When you have states passing laws making it illegal for you to do something in another state that is perfectly legal within that second state, ala the abortion laws places like Idaho are trying to pass, how is the a cohesive nation?
You can frame it the same way too as states making things legal that are illegal in other states. But that's kind of the whole point of states, is for them to be different. It's not actually disintegrating the nation, it's providing choices. The problem comes when states use the federal government to attempt to override other states. If each state can just do their own thing and as a country we focus on prosperity, mutual aid and defense then our similarities bring us together more than our differences push us apart.
Each state is supposed to be different. Diversity is wealth. The disintegration is the forcing of everything to be the same.
I’m not talking about the states making things differently legal within their borders. I’m taking about things like the laws that make it illegal for you to get an abortion in another state where abortion is legal. It’s one state infringing on the rights of another state unless you view people as citizens of their states and not the country as a whole. That’s why I am asking how it isn’t breaking up a cohesive nation.
People literally are citizens of both their states and the country as a whole. For better our worse, the USA was intentionally structured that way with dual sovereignty.
Yes, but the states have a sovereignty that is equal to each other. They aren’t allowed to make conduct illegal that occurs in other states. Even if it was legal it’s not part of being a cohesive country.
The post I responded to originally implied that having the federal government enforce standards would lead to “The long term disintegration” of the country. I am pointing out that without the federal government enforcing standards we are already seeing states set up a long term disintegration of the country.
> a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
And yet, it seems society has never been so much polarized. Seems a bit like the "hipster effect"
Completely agree I went from we should be two nations to federal govt should much less powerful one way to get started is remove federal tax and instead have states collect all taxes then pass it to federal government
But from the very basic metric of not wanting people to have bad things happen to them, when you see promoters of state powers intent on using it to tear down civil rights as fast as possible, strong state power in the current political environment seems like a major regression for many people in the country.
OK sure, some people want more local power. Why? Lower taxes? Or maybe because they don't like Oberfell or Casey.
It's important to look at consequences of changes.
Federal power can be used to eliminate civil rights just as easily as it can be used to create them.
Besides, the congress stopped expanding civil rights decades ago. Now it only comes from the Supreme Court, which is unaffected by more federalism.
Congress could vote tomorrow to cement abortion as a right, or gay marriage as a right… but they choose not too. The cynic in me thinks that they choose not to so both sides can continue to raise money fear mongering about the Supreme Court.
States follow the Supreme Court's rulings, that is less guaranteed in a situation where there is less balance of power. There is no physical force preventing states from ignoring rulings (and of course in practice they do ignore shit, but politics happens at the courts as well).
I agree 100% that Congress could cement abortion as a right tomorrow and should have a billion years ago. It's insulting to everyone that we have had to watch the degradation of rights through court rulings over time as congress shrugs its shoulders because they are afraid of having convictions.
But I still think that if states had more power, we simply would have less civil rights across the board. States can already pass laws and guarantee rights at a state level, and many simply choose not to.
It's all terrible right now, but I can only see things getting worse if you just say "let's have the states do stuff", based on the past ... I don't know, century of American history.
Just how I see things at the moment though, and I will freely admit I am biased to believe my theory and haven't tried to research much to the contrary.
But remember laws like DOMA that were passed not very long ago that were explicitly written to prevent states from expanding rights.
And almost all recent civil rights advancements have not come from congress but the courts. Since the Civil Rights Act, the trend is that congress and the executive narrows rights and the court broadens them.
> Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local.
Donald Trump always struck me as a character out of a western. Only in 'western' times he would have just 'owned' one town.
While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too impressed with (if also afraid of) technology.
Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I also think he's more impressed with AI-generated content than is warranted; unpaid zealots can crank the stuff out in more than enough quantity.
Turchin blames elite overproduction; it seems a much more fundamental issue than social media. Haidt even provides evidence for that here:
"These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society."
Now, don't get me wrong, I am no fan of FB or Twitter, but I don't think Haidt's take on this is accurate. The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it.
I feel like Alvin Toffler was already onto something in Future Shock (1970). The modern world is just too interconnected and things are changing too fast. We're constantly thrust into ambiguous situations, exposed to a flood of information beyond our capacity to process, and grievances of the historical past pile up and rub against each other because there are no borders, no boundaries. Careers, ways of life, communities, everything just rent asunder.
Overall, I think our ape reflexes are overwhelmed. No wonder so many of us start to descend into madness in our private, demon-haunted worlds, that Sagan wrote about. All of us are completely overcome by this never-ending torrent. There is no peace.
On top of that, we've had a simmering culture war since before I was born. The volume on it has just got turned up all the way. People are, frankly, traumatized at every turn.
And then, on top of that, technology is just shoveling this pile in your face constantly. Trying to get in every second of every day and get a slice of that sweet, sweet, attention economy. So they can dose it up with some advertising steroids to get you to buy, buy, watch, watch.
Is it any wonder we are all nuts? We're being driven nuts!
So much stress we have is stuff we just put upon ourselves. Oh man I better pick up or else my partner/parent/boss will scold me. I have to put on nice clothes to go out, I can't look like a slob. I am made to feel bad about how I look. I am forced to spend the day sitting and thinking instead of out foraging and using my legs and eyes. I have an insatiable need for ever more material goods thanks to the science of addiction being applied to marketing. I exist as a warmbody to generate disposable income for another to take, I merely hold currency transiently in its passage towards some inevitable black hole of wealth.
IMO society is almost like this behavioral disease. It's no wonder we are so depressed, when it is so very different from what we have evolved to live by: a life of foraging, working on personal survival, and raising kin.
> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's.
I know this is in the context of the build up to the civil war, but how much were neighbors at each other’s necks? I don’t know much about that period aside from the obvious events that followed (slavery being the huge and obvious motivator for the war), so I’m not sure how divided everybody was.
But it seems like in the US today, the divide is spread across the entire country. Nearly everybody is aligned with either A or B group and agrees with nearly straight down the column with that group’s general viewpoints. Some areas lean A or B, but you’ll always have someone vehemently against the other group no matter where you go. I don’t think the US today would have a north-south divide so much as it would a political party divide.
> But it seems like in the US today, the divide is spread across the entire country.
Personally I don't think the divide is as large as we think it is, I think it's just a result of social media skewing what is "popular".
If you have 100 people, 80 are moderates, 10 have stronger political views, and the other 10 have extreme political views. Social media algorithms will almost always promote the content from those 10 because it gets the most shares and the world will seem like it's filled with those 10 folks.
You would only believe that if you don't actually talk to your neighbors. In the real world (i.e. not the corporate media) most people have more moderate and nuanced viewpoints. Demonizing and alienating those people is not a winning political strategy.
This is, by the way, one reason why the Joe Rogan Experience podcast has been so amazingly popular. The host comes across as a moderate leftist, but he has guests from across the political spectrum and gives them a chance to fully explain their views instead of shouting at them. The corporate media are naturally horrified by this since it undermines their ability to drive ratings by pushing a false "red versus blue" narrative.
Not trying to fit into your red vs blue grouping, but I don’t think anyone considers Joe Rogan to be left at all. He’s generally seen at Dr Oz for 30 year old dudes. I’ve listened to some after hearing him hyped up and generally fitting into the target demographic. Didn’t find much nuance.
Rogan claims to have voted for Barack Obama twice. That's pretty typical for a moderate leftist. He gives his guests a chance to express a lot more nuance than you see in mainstream media channels. Most of the criticism comes from people who haven't actually listened to many episodes all the way through, and just rely on biased takes from critics or short quotes taken out of context. I also used to have a negative opinion until I played some whole episodes with interviews of really interesting people.
Youre skipping the criticism of his guest list. He's had Bernie Sanders on what, once, twice? Then he's had no other major leftist political figures or commentators but has has loads of extreme right wing figures including crackpots like Alex Jones.
Joe Rogan can claim he is a moderate leftist all he wants, but his guest list on JRE does not support that
You're really missing the point. The JRE podcast has very few straight up politicians as guests. But it does frequently have guests who express leftist views as part of a broader conversation about other topics. For example Oliver Stone or Meghan Murphy or Ben Burgis or Andrew Dessler.
This is why the show resonates with a lot of listeners who are themselves moderates and don't buy into the fake news narrative about an irreconcilable political divide.
I don't watch and don't know much about Joe Rogan, but what would be the point of inviting guests that share your viewpoint? You already know what they're going to say, and so do your watchers.
It seems more beneficial to legitimate inquiry to invite moderates with an opposing viewpoint, and more conducive to ratings (drama) to invite polarizing figures of all ilk (Alex/Bernie) but particularly those whose viewpoint differs most from your own.
That is an argument with some merit, but I don’t believe it applies here. Rogan brings on many polarizing guests, they happen to be mostly conservative. It’s not like he’s bringing on only moderates from all branches of politics
If I'm conservative, but my friends are liberal, am I a liberal? Or maybe I'm not a conservative, and they're not liberals: we all hold different nuanced opinions based on our own life and personal experience. Binning someone based on a subset of the company they keep is dismissive at best and purposefully malignant at worst.
I’m binning a talk show host who dabbles in politics into a political bin based on their political guests. Judging them on the people they platform is explicitly what you should do. This isn’t his private life with friends and family I’m judging him on. This is especially in light of the fact that he claims to be moderate because he “has anyone on” while his actions do not show that to be true.
I don’t mean to single you out, so please don’t take the next question as a personal attack but as curiosity. I’ve seen this argument pop up in the past few months that you can’t judge someone by their actions or statements or infer their beliefs based off of them. The reasoning has boiled down to either not taking into account their entire life or not being able to know their thoughts so I couldn’t possibly be able to accurately hold an opinion of them. Where did you get this belief/feeling or am I misinterpreting what you are saying?
I'll bite, but I'd like to preface my response by saying that I'm not particularly a fan of Joe Rogan, even having watched a couple of his shows. The issue with saying that someone is a 'moderate liberal' is that that implies that there is a center to the extremes of the political spectrum somewhere; as the Overton window shifts (especially in the context of, say, hosting a very conservative guest) the relative political leanings of the people involved in the conversation will shift as well. (Thus if Joe Rogan is a moderate conservative who hosts a lot of extreme conservatives, he may come off of as a moderate liberal to his audience).
So with that out of the way, here's my response:
If you're familiar with the issues of Nash equilibriums and Mesa-alignment, you should know that a person's actions will sometimes contradict their inner motivations (e.g. peer pressure), or that people will compromise on their beliefs in the short run in the interest of preserving their beliefs in the long run (e.g. expressing moderate political beliefs when one's convictions run much deeper).
So in one sense, you're right: we can never know the 'true' inner motivations of somebody else. This is why we say "actions speak louder than words" (or thoughts); ultimately, the rubber hits the road we have to equate one's external actions with their internal beliefs.
I would say it's your right to express your opinion about what you think of others. I'm not arguing that 'because we don't know Joe Rogan's inner alignment, we can infer his political leanings at all.' What I am saying, though, is that Joe Rogan is not his podcast, and there are a number of reasons why a liberal talk show host would host more conservatives than liberals. I think it would be fair to say that Joe Rogan is generally in favor of free speech, and surrounding oneself with opinions that contradict one's own beliefs are a good way to refine how you express the beliefs you hold. Belief is ultimately determined by experience, but the same experience may result in different beliefs in different people (again, boils down to inner alignment).
While the people you surround yourself may affect your beliefs and political leanings in the long run, I believe that the guests on Joe Rogan's show vary wildly in their beliefs (e.g. he's hosted both Bernie Sanders and hyperconservatives) and Rogan's role in the podcast is mostly to act as a sounding board to help the other person express their opinions; therefore I feel that Joe Rogan's action of (supposedly) hosting more conservative guests than liberal ones does not imply that Joe Rogan is conservative.
But on top of that, the original spirit of my comment was to point out that the political lines we usually draw completely discard the nuance present in the real world. Some of the beliefs may be perceived as conservative, and others liberal. Projecting someone's complex (often hidden or inferred) political beliefs onto a relative political spectrum (e.g. liberal vs conservative) is a poor measure at best and purposefully tribalistic and reductive at worst.
Perhaps it would make more sense if we identified in the conversation the difference between Joe Rogan the private individual and Joe Rogan the public persona.
I can see the point you make when it comes to a persons personal life, but when it comes to a publicly aired entertainment show the choice of guests and opinions aired _are_ the political leanings of that public persona. He’s cannot just a sounding board as he is making the decisions of who gets air time.
It seems clear that the central issue of slavery transformed over 50 years from a general agreement that it was less than ideal and would go away in its own, to a deeply polarized issue which half the country thought it an abomination that should be immediately eliminated and the other half began to to think of it as a positive good for the slaveholder and slave.
It was more regional than our current disputes which are almost fractal in their geography
That's just not what happened, slavery wasn't a main topic for the average person. Even in the south where there were slaves most people didn't own slaves. The debate around it did exist but it was an infrequent topic. Much much more common was discussions regarding import and export issues and transportation networks. Support for the poor and insane were big issues. Religion and temperance we're far more debated than slavery.
There's a lot of places to read newspapers from that time period online and you can see what topics were frequent and divisive.
Well I'm told there were numerous instances of brothers in the same family fighting on different sides. In some states such as Kansas, neighbors were most definitely attacking each other (and not just verbally).
That Trump's pleas for his supporters to take the vaccine fell on deaf ears appears to indicate things aren't quite that clear cut. Perhaps some groups are more inclined to force compliance with all of their views than other groups.
I think this just shows that politics is largely not a generative project. Trump tapped into a current of grievance and honed his message on that and almost never went against whatever got the biggest cheers at his rallies. He wasn’t the mastermind who came up with these ideas. They were already there.
I think it's just the idea of endorsing prophylactic medicine. Since anyone could be a potential victim of a virus, everyone should consider vaccination. And while it's not compulsory, the suggestion that it be widely advocated sets the conspiracy folks on edge. They seem to pin their identity on { I'm not like the others + mistrust of authority }. So it's really easy to accept a message that the too-trusting have all fallen into a trap that they're too smart for. If it's not tracking, it's greed, or some other motive driving evildoers to vaccinate the world.
Hydroxychloroquine was attractive because it was available before the vaccine and you would only need to administer it to the infected. Of course, a few did try to take it prophylactically and at least one OD'd.
Trump is so purely and consistently self serving. He didn't promote the vaccine enough because he feared his successor would get the credit and he (rightly) feared his base would hold it against him. And he only promoted it when he realized that his supporters were dropping like flies and millions of the kids in the next generation will turn eighteen before the next presidential election.
The vaccines are a triumph of humanity that should be celebrated. They were produced, tested and distributed very rapidly (among the wealthiest countries). We could stand to improve significantly at how well it was distributed to poorer nations. But IMO a positive story overall. And antivaxxers might have had reason to be cautious at first, but now it's so widely distributed that it doesn't make much sense to fear it anymore. the long term consequences of the infection are likely much much worse than the long term consequences of vaccination.
Not GP (although I agree with them), but Trump's words and actions over the past 40 years or so make it quite clear that Donald Trump cares about three things:
1. Donald Trump
2. Donald J. Trump
3. Donald John Trump
and everything else is just background noise, if that.
I feel like I see a lot of HN/HN-adjacent (pg, his friends, etc) conversation about polarization and elite overproduction that totally misses the asymmetry between the left and the right.
Like, sure, there are plenty of middle-to-upper-middle-class white liberals with “In This House We Believe” signs in their front yards. But while they may be culturally liberal, if you poll them on Medicare for All, wealth taxes, putting workers on corporate boards, or a $15 minimum wage, you’ll probably find that the rich white people of America aren’t clamoring to do anything that would threaten the status of corporations of people with lots of property. However the people who are (like the Amazon workers who just unionized, or the diverse coalition behind Bernie’s campaigns) are more sympathetic than suburban white liberals, and don’t fit as nicely into the horseshoe shape.
Meanwhile the Right is all in line on their agenda. The Right’s rich white folks aren’t worried about their masses voting against corporate interests, and they’ll happily sign off on whatever culture war issues it takes to keep the middle and working class parts of their constituency coming to the polls.
Having both progressive and conservative friends, I have to say that I see just as much division on the right nowadays, as on the left. Trump and Romney, for example, don't get along all that well. Christian conservatives and Tea Party activists have very different priorities on, for example, gay-marriage vs. big banks, and very different attitudes towards big corporations or many other topics. It was, for many years, true that the right was more cohesive than the left, but this seems very different in the last ten years.
Elite overproduction does seem a much more sensible focus here.
If you want to blame the internet, then the obvious path is the "shared story" angle. There was a single mainstream dominant narrative for a while, but it couldn't hold up to the public talking directly to each other all the time, it was too full of holes and too clearly mostly a bunch of bullshit (remember the internet era before these "turning points" was heavy on the 'debunking' stuff).
So the elites are fighting over who gets to attempt to put in place the new official narrative (and many hope to make it a dominant narrative again but that seems far fetched to me).
It seems ... very obvious. I guess the problem is that my story depends on the old narrative being a constructed untrue thing and that's too "unamerican" of me?
Facebook is mentioned 19 times, Fox News once, and talk radio zero. This is a very techno deterministic argument that utterly fails to acknowledge the main source of misinformation and division is boring old tech like cable news and radio. The main role Facebook serves is to make Fox and radio personalities more accessible.
I don’t know why Fox gets all the credit. I distinctly remember watching MSNBC in the early 2000s during the Bush era and it was surprisingly… centrist. Most of the stuff that passes for news today would have been considered radical.
Their scale. Other news sources may be guilty of the same behavior, but Fox News has the largest audience so its natural it has the largest amount of criticism.
Fox News and conservative talk radio have existed since the early 1990s yet the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010, which appears to prove Haidt's point.
Something else happened around 2010 -- we elected a black president. Frankly that made a lot of people lose their minds. I think there's a lot of folks out there who don't mind black people exactly, but absolutely abhor the idea that a black person might be in a position of power over them. Witness the commentary from the far right on the new Supreme Court Justice: "Your children and your grandchildren are going to have to take orders from people like her." (Among a pet-store's worth of other dog whistles. Source: https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-ketan...)
I recall the news here (in Norway) covering a demonstration against Obama during the elections. They interviewed a woman who was in tears because she, apparently, really thought Obama would kill her kids if he got elected.
To me it seemed so utterly bizarre I had problems processing it.
It's kinda hard to untangle, unfortunately. Like to contrast your point of view about people not liking to see a black person in power over them: perhaps a black person in a position of power was the catalyst by inciting racial discord (not just among whites, but black people too). I wouldn't be surprised, as a black person he was expected to promote issues affecting black people.
Fox News took a shift toward more alarmism and a bolder, "holy shit things are happening!" look after 9/11[0]. My recollection is that it had another major shift—independent of other media, this time, which shared some of Fox News' alarmism after 9/11—around the time Obama's Presidential candidacy started, moving farther into entertaining and promoting fringe ideas (like the birth certificate thing), and kept going down that road afterward.
[0] A little while back I was at my parents' house and they had Fox News on in the background (of course) and I noticed that this has now gone so far that everything at the bottom runs with a big "FOX NEWS ALERT" tag and all the trappings that come with some kind of urgent announcement—for every little mundane thing, no exceptions.
> the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010
You're late by about 200 years.
There was an unusually long period from the 1930s through the early 1990s where, due to a set of overlapping partisan realignments, the divide between the major parties did not line up with the main axis of polarization, such that after the end of this period with the crystalization of the partisan alignment partisan polarization increased, but the prior bipartisan era was not one of low polarization, but merely of poor alignment between party and salient ideology.
America’s intense partisan polarization is it's normal state.
Fox News came about in 1996. I remember before that, there was just Rush and co, and they were fringe on the radio. Fox when mainstream in the early 2000s and just snowballed slowly ever since. There was never a moment where extreme polarization just suddenly appeared. Rush in the early 1990s was saying f-nut stuff back then, too.
I do think the internet was required for the final acceleration into madness.
In general commercial media is seeking ad dollars, even though its saying some crazy things it still has some limits. In addition, it has a limited number of guests and they tend to get limited to 'interesting' individuals.
The internet is not limited in such a fashion and the echo chambers and feedback loops are faster.
Limbaugh was so "fringe on the radio" that they gave him a Monday Night Football announcer spot, at least until he had a predictable response to a black football player in a position traditionally played by white guys.
"The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it. " And certainly based on past statements he's made, I took that the tech augmented the issue, but was not being posed as the root cause. Like you I think Turchin is on to something, but Haidt here is also largely pointing out a symptom that has immense influence in the current day.
To that, I'm not sure if he is as much "afraid/impressed with tech" as much as pointing the human inability to think remotely (or even care most of the time) about laws of unintended consequences, let alone how to address them when they inevitably arise.
“He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.“
Calling Occupy nihilistic is strikes me as blinkered, and shows the neoliberal bias of the author. Occupy is where the 99% vs. 1% lens arose, which is a reasonable description of concentration of wealth and power across Western countries and especially the US. Occupy attempted to employ more empowering and less alienating peer-to-peer governance.
Occupy didn’t “succeed”, probably due to both internal and external forces, but it wasn’t nihilistic.
Occupy failed because it didn't have any clear asks or metrics to track. They were against the bailouts. Did they vote anyone out of office? Did the re-election rate of 90% budge? Are there "Occupy Democrats" like there were "Tea Party Republicans"?
But most importantly, did they stop future bailouts? The original uproar about the 2008 bailouts (TARP) was originally authorized to spend $700 billion, of which they spent $431 billion and they were all paid back.
What about with Covid relief? This time the politicians learned not to go through legislature and just use the Federal Reserve directly. This time they were able to disburse 4 trillion in asset purchases, most of which was held by large institutions (banks). $1.3 trillion in mortgage backed securities! Another $3 trillion was spent on liquidity measures, other load purchases, lending facilities, etc. So in total a 10x spend from the proposed 2008 bailout which caused all the uproar. Note this doesn't include any money for income support, stimulus, etc. It was just giving money to banks.
Occupy just taught the politicians how to do things under the radar.
>Occupy just taught the politicians how to do things under the radar.
Was it under the radar though? It seems like as many people know about it, but that this time the target and reasoning for the loans was just more liked by the general public.
There will always be reasoning for the bailouts. "We can't let the banks fail because that means they'll stop giving out loans to small businesses and homeowners." There was reasoning in 2008. The difference is now there's no expectation of them paying it back. It's not a loan, its just sitting on the balance sheet of the Fed. Banks may buy them back later, but its always at an advantage since its completely voluntary.
There were additional measures for direct payments and loans for small businesses. This was very targeted to prop up the balance sheet of large banks.
You see shady stuff like this all the time. Is there a reason mortgage rates are pushing 5% but savings accounts at places like Bank of America are paying literally 0.01%?
Occupy failed because the organizers were systematically jailed on the eve of the major protests, preventing them from coordinating and establishing goals like the ones you are looking for.
Exactly! They were pulled off the street hours before the major marches/protests/actions, and released the next day when it was too late to participate on the ground.
So someone would post an event on Facebook, get 1000 people to show up at the Brooklyn Bridge or what have you, and then all 1000 of them would stand around saying "who's in charge here?" because the actual organizer was in police custody! Occupy was dismantled in the public eye very effectively using this tactic.
It's not giving money to banks. Central banks manage the money supply. This of course can help banks make more loans, but banks make loans even if the money supply is tight.
I also don’t like the disrespect Occupy often gets. Yes they didn’t have ready made solution but neither does Wall Street. The bailouts in 2008 and generally the rising inequality show that Wall Street is perfectly fine with making the lives of a lot of people worse as long as they can make money for themselves. To me the nihilists are the ruling class that only cares about them self and nothing else.
Agreed - media portrays OWS as broken movement with no goals and no hope of changing anything. That's neo-lib PR - corp media does not want you take OWS issues (pro-union, anti-corporate, Medicare for all, etc) seriously.
In my home city the OWS movement denigrated into a homeless encampment with a handful of banners and sign waivers. I don’t think a neoliberal media was the culprit because from the beginning the local movement lacked any sense of cohesion or the coordination required to exert pressure on local politicians. The righteous anger burned bright for a few months then slowly faded and nothing really came of it. I distinctly remember a lack of a figurehead and a lack of specific reform they wanted to get people to support.
Same experience here. I lived in Portland at the time and was sympathetic to the cause. But then seeing the protest devolve and turn the Park Blocks into a sketchy homeless encampment really made it difficult to support the cause. The media didn’t have to twist anything, the results spoke for themselves. Your average person is not going to support something that turns their parks into shanty towns.
Without the media portrayal, at the time I thought OWS was a broken movement with no goals and no hope of changing anything. That's having gone there and having friends that stayed.
It was a bunch of people against something vague but with no real agenda. Soon enough it changed from anger at wall st to anger at the cops saying they couldn't camp there. Nothing was accomplished.
Do you have to be a neoliberal to think the way those protests were organized with the hand signals was ridiculously silly?
Great, income inequality, important subject to tackle. Are we going to get creative, involve serious people, suggest intelligent chang-- oh, you're flashing signs at each other aimlessly for days on end.
> Great, income inequality, important subject to tackle. Are we going to get creative, involve serious people, suggest intelligent chang--
Arguably, Occupy was just the start. I'd say it did end up setting the groundwork for doing much more. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns, for example.
It's absurd how the author (and presumably their editorial board) are so willing to paint a picture that absolves them of guilt for the inequality in their country.
News flash. If you say that you are wealthy/powerful and "politically liberal", but don't support policies that would give away that wealth or power to those with less of it in society, then you are not "politically liberal", you are conservative. I don't hate the Boomers, but their ideas have been around for far too long. Society in the United States is far too conservative.
It's time for a liberal ideal that isn't about race or gender but about economics and equity. And I mean equity in a color-blind sense, can we please work together here; I know the world is not fair and race does play a role in that equation.
Living in Europe opened my eyes. None of the liberals in the US are liberal. I want CHANGE. Not Barack Obama's "change". I want unions. I want free healthcare. I want to house the homeless. The Dutch can do it, but somehow in the discourse here, it's "impossible". Oh, our country is "too big". Oh my god, stop. Can we please move past the legacy of the boomers and their anti-big government stances. That was just a cynical jab at their parent's generation; it's not real. The government CAN do things. We can do so much if we work together.
>I want to house the homeless. The Dutch can do it, but somehow in the discourse here, it's "impossible"
I mean the Dutch don't do that. Homelessness in the Netherlands has been rising for years and is higher per capita than the US. It's also one of those "very hard" problems - SF spent something like 300 million a year to try and house 8,000 homeless people and failed at it.
I have argued at length with people on this board about this very subject, and the answer is the way that the problem is measured in either country. The HUD survey is a farce; it's designed to underestimate the problem. You could easily infer with data who is homeless and who is not, and that's what the Dutch do. Maybe you are Dutch and unaware of the discrepancy, not sure. Housing and the tax benefits are very hot button issues in the Netherlands and the youth hate how cynical the old are considering the subject, so I get that their system is not perfect. But being critical is how things change.
I also find it hard to believe that you could accept a fact like this so easily. There is a very visible homeless problem in every large American city that you don't see in the Netherlands. And Amsterdam used to have a very similar problem that was only recently cleaned up in the mid-2000's.
>I also find it hard to believe that you could accept a fact like this so easily.
What does this mean?
I've looked at the OECD data generally, looked most closely into France but definitely into the Netherlands - the Netherlands actually has pretty good data over time. In both places though there is a significant secondary problem with undocumented homelessness. It's one of the major reasons the number appears so much lower than Germany or Luxembourg, for example.
Even with that, youth homelessness doubled in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2020. Homelessness generally grew by over 25% from 2016-2018, according to OECD data.
The Netherlands as of 2017 had about 70,000 people living in homeless accommodations according to federatie opvang and 30,500 either sleeping rough or in uncertain temporary shelters. According to the CBS it increased to 38,000 by 2019. Yeah, there's been a major decline in youth homelessness during Covid and that's great but it's not a solved issue.
BTW for comparison, France - same time period: 100,000 in accommodations, roughly 18,000 rough sleepers/people in uncertain temp shelters.
>the answer is the way that the problem is measured in either country.
No, no it isn't. The Netherlands does not claim to have solved its homelessness issue, because it has not solved it. How you slice the data between there and the US has nothing to do with the domestic issue.
>There is a very visible homeless problem in every large American city that you don't see in the Netherlands. And Amsterdam used to have a very similar problem that was only recently cleaned up in the mid-2000's.
Not to be snarky but visibility doesn't actually mean anything.
I wouldn't gloss over this, the US presides over 330 million people across 3.8 million square miles, whereas the Netherlands has 17 million people across 16,000 square miles. This size and diversity of the US is a significant contributor to the national political dynamics IMO.
Yet the EU has better standards and works better for all citizens of the EU in comparison to the United States, despite the cultural and language barriers.
You could have definitely said this twenty years ago and I wouldn't have blinked an eye, but times change. They are doing it... technology and data help governments administrate more efficiently over large land masses. Italy and Germany also have similar federal systems and, again, work better together than we do, although Italy is probably somewhat compareable. At least they have culture lol
The EU did not arrive at those standards together or not implement them from a central authority. If anything, the EU serves as a success story of allowing states to implement their own changes and slowly converge at a target.
The Netherlands and Romania do not need to have a shared approach and timeline for dealing with homelessness. the Dutch can do it specifically because they don't have to get 27 states and 440 million people on board with their policy.
Similarly, Abortion rights vary widely throughout the EU, and are generally more restrictive than the US. This is understood as a state issue, and is not a perpetual wedge issue for EU policy.
If you want unions, socialized healthcare, public services and the other trappings of European societies you need to start thinking about immigration and demographics. The very high levels of immigration (both legal and illegal) into the US is what makes it difficult for workers to exercise leverage because they can easily be replaced by people who will work for much less compensation. Ethnically diverse workforces are also less likely to unionize (e.g. this is a factor Amazon looks at when assessing unionization risk). It seems to me that socialist policies can only work in relatively ethnically homogeneous societies, which is what you see in Europe. Although that is now changing there too: it will be interesting to see whether they are able to maintain generous social services in the face of major demographic change.
There's a lot to unpack here. Western Europe took in more immigrants than the United States did last year, by numbers and percentage. You could make an argument that illegal immigration tips that towards the US, but I don't think that's true.
> relatively ethnically homogeneous societies, which is what you see in Europe
So, this one. It's always hard to say because European countries don't measure "race" in the way that the US does. The concept of knocking on peoples' doors and asking them what race they are is absurd to the average European. It's funny because this discussion kind of lays clear that the concept is poorly defined and the American conception of "race" isn't really true. Other than the phenotypical differences between east asians, blacks, and red-haired whites; there is so much variance amongst the rest that there is hardly anything you could call a "race" if you mean a demonstrably different genetic phenotype.
If you think that the Netherlands is a white ethno-state, then I'm not sure what to tell you. It's not, not even close. Germany brought a million Syrians into its borders a few years ago. The only part of Europe that doesn't have large-scale immigration and white ethno-states is eastern Europe. Even Scandinavia has pretty large-scale immigration at this point, except for Finland (also not a part of Scandinavia really, but important to clarify). They need the people. If you've ever been to Oslo, it is very obvious why. The place is empty.
The US Border Patrol encountered over 100,000 attempted illegal crossings every month in 2021. It's estimated that each year somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people cross the border illegally without being caught or overstay their visa. There are nearly 50 million foreign born persons in the US total, about double the rate per capita of Europe.
Europe is on the same demographic trajectory - the current statistics put Europe where the US was in the 1990s. Focusing on unions as an example, since the 1990s, the US has lost approximately half the union membership rate in the private sector. This is in part due to immigration and in part due to offshoring, both mechanisms serve to weaken the power of the domestic worker.
You may be right that "race" isn't perfectly well defined, but socially and culturally it does exist and it plays a role in how people act. For example, even in highly diverse and progressive places you find clear racially segregated patterns of residence, with major downstream effects in areas like education, employment and healthcare. This is true in both the US and Europe. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that phenomenon.
There are two different things and one is used to silence the other. You have social policies and economic policies. The economic policies are devoutly conservative / corporatist and have been since Reagan. This is generally known as neoliberalsm. Both parties bow to the alter of conservative economic policies because they are both paid to do just that.
Now, the socialist policies, that's where the magic happens. If you can get the people to constantly bicker at each other about intentionally vague and ill defined social issues, well then you've succeeded in having them not talk about the economic policies and the status quo remains in place for the people who want it to remain in place. These are generally known as the culture wars. See you can't really make laws about social issues that do a whole lot, but you can sure make laws about economic ones: NAFTA, trade deals, government contracts, minimum wealth requirements, minimum wage laws, union laws, regulatory direction and funding, tax policy, etc.
Economic policies that are good for the citizenry will alleviate most of the social problems we've been trained to focus on, but we can't take our eyes off the social bickering enough to actually make our lives economically better.
To be fair to libertarian types (conservative isn't all that Liberal these days...), the critique of progressive ideas is that they never reach their real benefits and instead get sidetracked (corrupted), but not before concentrating power among the elites again.
Point being, this post seems to be describing that outcome.
which, in my eyes, is a conservative view. Why even try to change the system if it just corrupts itself again? wink wink The Atlantic is a "liberal" rag because they talk about the culture wars... but changing the system? Oh, impossible. We'll just hang here on the cross, unable to change our fate. Those meanie conservatives just won't go to heaven, the meek will inherit the earth!
Nothing about this story seems odd to you? The focus on American cultural events, big corporations, billionaires? Literally none of those things matters, even if it is popular here to identify with them. A better article would just be a chart of the gini coefficient over the last sixty years.
> Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable- it is easier to change your mind and be open to new ideas, you can be more honest and direct, and less fearful of bad actors. The author of this post clearly thinks the entire net to be composed of nothing but Facebook/Twitter/Instagram and the like, but the definition of "social media" can be extended to any 1 or more machines which can send and receive IP datagrams between each other. The internet was doing just fine when people owned more of their communications, running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.
Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms so that we can return to what was before, all while retaining the gift of anonymity.
> Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable
> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms
I feel like I'm seeing a pattern here, something like "Hey, it's not that simple. Your solution ignores important tradeoffs. So here's my simple solution that ignores different tradeoffs."
Basically I'm objecting to any use of the word "just" in thorny social issues like this. I think that all of this is hard and none of this is obvious.
I learned a few years ago to see (and hear) the word "just" as a red flag, whether used by others or myself. I do catch myself "just"ing sometimes, but always seek to restate the sentence without the word "just". It is reliably a clearer, more honest and expressive formulation, and provokes deeper consideration in both the listener and, importantly, the speaker.
(Just is an overloaded word with several definitions, some of which are fine - "a just decision", "it just happened" - I'm referring to its use in a dismissive, diminutive or disparaging sense.)
My other red flag words are "assume" and "trivial". As in "I just assumed it was trivial".
Hahaha that's very true! My bias against the front-ends of those services is showing. That still doesn't mean they don't need regulation though.
To elaborate, there is a world of difference between some smaller forum/board/chat network/webserver run by some random guy/girl in a community, and a multi-billion dollar public corporate entity hellbent on extracting every bit of value from every facet of your life that they possibly can. Either the fact that these companies can wield such enormous powers over the population, or the manner in which they do so, needs to see the light and society must decide on how they will restrain these actors.
I know that some people (ugh, yes... most people...) favor these media today as their means of communication, marketing, discourse, etc, but these corporations have gone way too far, and restricting the actual good things the internet brings like anonymity while ignoring the far more pressing evils of these unchecked capitalists is silly.
The internet can remain anonymous at large, but we could require any company with an audience larger than, say, 10k people to operate within the parameters Haidt describes. In other words, you can be completely anonymous if using small communities, but if you are operating within a platform so large that it has the power to influence the outcome of elections, we need to regulate whether or not you are actually human. And yes, we do need to make you accountable if you break laws in these platforms. I do value anonymity immensely, yet I see no other way around this hurdle. The solution you describe - simply banning Twitter, Facebook, etc. - is more damaging in my opinion.
Knowing what these companies do with any bit of data they can extract from you is plenty reason to object to KYC for all rules.
If anonymity is the sacrifice, I just won't partake in the discussion. It might reduce vitriol in discourse, but will do far more to quell debate when the cost is your career, relationships, etc.
I’ve implemented parts of KYC systems. It’s one component of what is essentially an outsourced surveillance mechanism. It is probably going to abused some day.
People want the government to have that power and to start inspecting and regulating speech so we can be more like China and we can fix the crisis of anonymous dissent and wrongthink? Oh well. I suppose it’s not really surprising.
Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts. That's assuming there are any US based profits to tax. Most companies of a certain scale only make money in Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caymans.
To my understanding, that only works if the corporations are still owned by a master entity. It wouldn't do anything if, for instance, an apartment complex of 1,000 units was split into 1,000 corporations that paid a non-profit HOA, and each of the 1,000 corporations just happened to have the same ownership by natural persons.
Instead of talking about the dangers of anonymity, I think we need to reframe the argument in terms of the dangers of social credit score. I don't mean dangers from authoritarians, of course. Everyone understands how the Chinese system is terrible, for instance. I mean the dangers of a "natural", "emergent" social credit score. The kind that you get for free when you attach a way to establish who is who to otherwise anonymous messaging.
It is a problem of trust.
Humans are very trusting. I don't mean this in the sense that we are naive, but rather that we perform an enormous amount of our decision making on beliefs whose veracity we have not established with experiment or argument or proof, but on the basis that someone who you trust believes it too.
This is a very convenient heuristic, as otherwise you probably wouldn't be willing to get on an airplane, but it has very serious implications when a wrong idea gets too much traction, and now suddenly everyone believes it only because everyone else believes it. What does this have to do with identity, you say? Well, if you don't know who said something, you don't know whether or not to trust it. No one (well, almost no one) trusts something just because it is written down somewhere. The aggregate amount of identity floating around is an upper bound on how much belief that can be created exclusively by the trust mechanism.
Moreover, trust is increasing. This is a little abstract, but if there is a belief that tends to only be expressed by the people I trust, and someone expresses that belief, I gain a little more trust in that person. I have added trust to the system. Note again that this would be impossible in a completely anonymous system.
One would hope that the breaking of trust was transitive in the same way that the gaining of trust is transitive. If I discover that you actually believe something wrong, or you want to hurt me, or any of the dozens of things that mean that I shouldn't trust you, then all of the things that I believe because you believed them get put back in the queue. These beliefs should have to be rejustified.
Unlike in the trust creation process though, this is essentially impossible. Not only do I have to go back and find out all the things that I believe because you believed them, but also find the things that I believe because someone else trusted you and I trusted them, and so forth. If the community is small enough, it is possible to regroup and redo the corrupted calculations, but the upper bound on that is obviously very low. Really the reason that trust can still survive is that the social penalties for lying from a highly trusted position are that you do not get to participate in the gains from trade that being so trusted provide. Again, if you are a doctor, you lose your entire livelihood if people do not trust you.
So there are two factors that influence whether an epistemological system of trust can survive the interference of trusted liars. The first is how rare trusted liars are, and the second is how much total trust there is in the system. A system which is trusting enough can be completely obliterated by even very rare trusted liars. If your community is the size of the internet, and as fundamentally predicated on trust as non-anonymous social media has become, then your entire system of belief (based on trust) functionally does not have a chain of custody. This is a crisis of epistemology. Any adversary capable of creating trusted liars is not going to find that they have much trouble doing so.
This brings me to my final point, which is that trust is valuable. It is the very basis of advertising, and they have even gotten bold enough to throw the curtain aside and brand themselves as "influencers". Trust can, and is, bought and sold on the open market. The more trusted you are, the more valuable your betrayal is. A doctor can make more than enough money appearing on talk shows for it to be worth trading their good will.
The devastation that the corruption of the trust mechanism has had on the aggregate belief system has been profound. I think you will struggle to find a belief that is held by less than 20% of people.
---
Ultimately, two things are required. One is to pull an immediate 180 on internet "trustworthiness". Increasing aggregate trust is a catastrophe greater than global warming. Move to anonymous or pseudonymous boards immediately and never look back except in grave, well explained warnings of what lies that way. The second is that we must work towards reducing our reliance on trust as a mechanism entirely. This is exactly the opposite of what is taught in school, so I suppose it too relies on our capacity to perform a complete 180.
Even mathematics, THE constructive epistemology, is taught as a bunch of algorithms that you are expected to trust. For most people, even including those who take math in college, this is the only exposure to mathematics that they will ever have.
Science, likewise, is taught as a collection of facts, rather than the process by which those facts were obtained. Perhaps the only non-trust based epistemology that I encountered in my (pre-collegiate) education was in computer science. The-computer-does-what-you-tell-it-to is a pretty profound starting point. It certainly changed my life. I can't imagine that K-12 CS programs haven't been utterly neutered by the education system at this point, but hopefully, you can't bureaucracy away their main feature. It's a chink in the armor at least.
> Move to anonymous or pseudonymous boards immediately and never look back except in grave,
To accomplish what you describe here, you need to go beyond "anonymous" and "pseudonumous" boards, to completely untagged boards. You don't know me, but you (can come to know) my moniker "PaulDavisThe1st". This is just as much of an identity to build trust upon as whatever may actual name is.
I think the wholesale abolition of identity is probably too unpopular to be viable, and that the goal is accomplished with a sufficient reduction of identity. What counts as sufficient is anyone's guess, and probably too important to be left up to guesses, but I suspect that not allowing you to link an actual identity to the thing sufficiently dampens trust as to be sufficient.
If all you're risking is your karma by being outed as a deceiver, that's probably not enough for someone to trust that this is sufficient incentive to keep you honest. By extension, they no longer trust what you write.
That said, what you mean by untagged is what I meant by anonymous.
It's a tough nut to crack. There is genuine utility in being able to follow the respondents in a thread like this. I'm responding to u/ouid but will the next reply to this be from u/ouid or someone new who hasn't been a part of the conversation until now? This alters the dynamic of how the conversation continues to flow.
Of course, once you place a tag of any kind on someone's posts, you can begin to build a profile that destroys any anonimity. Perhaps a randomly generated number that persists in this article's comments but resets to something new on the next one? That gets unwieldy in a hurry and probably still allows the site operator to build a profile.
> running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.
Basically nobody used the internet for social interaction back then. Now that nearly everyone has the internet[0] and we've experienced a large shift of social interactions moving to tiktok/snapchat/twitter/FB, we have to deal with misinformation campaigns by overseas operatives[1]. Now, instead of some government-sanctioned KYC requirement (that would hopefully put more safeguards in to prevent the large social media companies from using it for anything other than verification), we have Twitter using phone numbers as the de-facto standard; this increases the cost of creating tons of fake accounts, but who knows how much more they'll ask for in 2024.
> Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
That won't change anything if parents keep buying smartphones for their 10 year olds.
> Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general.
The author uses the term social media here in this statement without much differentiation. Elsewhere though, he has differentiated “old school” social media from modern “social media.” I think he should have made that more clear here. He expressed earlier that the effects of “old school” social media were pretty benign.
I would like to propose that the term social media has become varied and ambiguous enough that it loses its value when introspecting on its modern effect. I’ve personally taken to no longer use the term “social media” and instead try to use variations on “profit media”, “engagement media”, and “highly mechanized.” These better capture (for me) the essence of what most modern supposed “social” platforms are really about.
That's an interesting take. I have found myself using 'social media' lately in an unsatisfying way, exactly because it fails to describe anything at this point.
If anything it is synonymous with 'communication' anymore
I have to speculate that the reason why "social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general" is oftentimes because it highlights their apparent failings (biases, lies, etc). That is, the problem is not primarily one of people failing to trust in trustworthy institutions, but due to a hyper-focus (retweeting) on the failings of those institutions.
As we communicate more, we find we don't agree as much as we thought we did, and that is divisive. Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.
> Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.
In theory.
In practice most people are too busy living their lifes and going through their struggles to voice anything. Leaving these platforms to be flooded by a vocal minority or worse, actors with an agenda.
This in turn provides a warped vision of reality to the 99% of non contributing 'listeners'.
Traditional media would not be flooded with extreme right or extreme left, or conspiracy theories without any evidence backing.
The current Turner/Murdoch media in the US is definitely not my understanding of 'traditional' journalism of the likes of Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters.
I disagree. Social media as now implemented are Darwinian black boxes optimized to evolve the most contagious memes, because engagement is stupidly easy to optimize for compared to any sane metric. As it turns out, the things we share the most when encouraged to do so are finely distilled vitriol. Moderated tone is critically important and good faith in disagreement is vital to a conversation. Twitter, is instead, the digital equivalent of literal shouting. It doesn’t really matter what exactly random strangers are shouting about in my estimate…
Yes. At its core, the issue with social media is that it amplifies "engagement" at the cost of anything else. It is impossible to breed socially productive ideas, in the allegory you describe, if your only focus is infectiousness. What you are left with are literal mental viruses that take up our collective mind space, leaving nothing in return.
Telling these institutions that if they want more trust, that they should earn it, is missing the point. The entire reason for ensuring trust in an institution is so that you can then cash in on it. It's marketing. The notion that these institutions were ever trustworthy is the remnants of whatever messaging you've internalized from them.
The freer expression and archival powers of the internet allow for people to see through the scam more and more. The division is hardly "right" and "left" (having almost nothing to do with economics). It's cultural at the low end, but higher up it's about trust, and whether one feels that institutional authority can or should be trusted at all.
It looks like every human era has its anxieties. Suddenly many of us got widespread access (if we dared), not only to 'all knowledge' (such as it is) including all of human history (much previously covered-up or lost), but to what's going through everyone's minds (and ever has). Bound to blow some of them. Biblicly speaking, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it."
I'd say the first 10 years of the 21st century were a hell of a lot stupider. We blew a budget surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy. We started two wars that lasted the better part of 20 years, one of which was waged against a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Oh, and we didn't win either of them.
We completely ignored the rise of China and any threat it posed, assuming all the while they'd become good capitalists and fall in love with Democracy.
Bankers tanked our economy so we bailed out them (bipartisan no less!), but not the average Americans they screwed. We turned our intelligence agencies against our own people.
Heck, compared to the first 10 years of the 21st century, the previous 10 years have been a relative period of enlightenment. In fact most of the problems over the last 10 years stem from the stupendously dumb decisions we made from 2000 to 2009.
That's not an appropriate comparison. You are talking about bad policies and political decisions, while Haidt is focusing on internal division and institutional erosion. The issue here is whether you will be free to see and declare the next war as a mistake, or whether the public space and political arena will be dominated by authoritarianism, fueled by the processes described in the article.
I think OP does bring up an important subject. The 00's set the stage for the 10's. The events they mentioned caused a huge lack of trust in our institutions - government, private, and media. The average American was a loser in the wars and in the economic crisis of 2008. The patriot act and related 9/11 fallout also set Americans up to accept authoritarianism in the name of security. We could not have been more ripe for the disruptive forces of the past decade.
But what about the rest of the world? Brazil was growing economically and lowering poverty in that decade, and still saw a far right wing government emerge through social media. France opposed the wars, didn't bailout anyone, and now there's almost a 50% chance they will vote for an extremist. I also grew up with this fact-based way of analyzing politics, but we ought to start thinking of it as a less rational and more emotional phenomenon if we want to stop it. Most of these movements, like Qanon or whatever, are completely delusional, like a cult. Whether the US had made good or bad decisions 15 years before it is irrelevant.
Bolsonaro's rise was partly due to the popularity of populist fellow-travelers like Trump, whose own rise (as per this thread) goes beyond social media. And surely the fall of Lula da Silva's government had something to do with the popularity of the right wing. Not to mention, their economic rise has since stalled.
As for France, the current Le Pen's own father made it to the second round of presidential elections as early as 2002, theirs is a family that has been around for decades. And surely the War on Terror, the rise of the American intelligence surveillance apparatus, reaction to that apparatus via Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, the Libyan Civil War (which Sarkozy's government was very much in favor of intervening in), the Syrian Civil War, and the ensuing refugee crises also have something to do with the increasing popularity of European nativist sentiment.
Finally, how quickly we forget the popular conspiratorial fringes of yesteryear. Before MAGA there was the Tea Party, before Qanon there was 9/11 Truthers, then anti-NWO Clinton-era militia movement, then so on back to the Birchers. The 2000s were no less a highly charged polarized environment as full of emotional phenomena, it had just as much fanaticism and tempers running hot, it just wasn't in realtime yet. There were plenty of message boards and blogs filled with vitriol back then. You want something more mainstream? The 2000s was the birth of FOX News as a conservative trumpet, and right-wing talk radio was huge as Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, and the late Rush Limbaugh were around to rile things up.
It's highly reductive to boil down the causes of discontent to social media, i.e. "people being crazy on the internet".
> Bolsonaro's rise was partly due to the popularity of populist fellow-travelers like Trump, whose own rise (as per this thread) goes beyond social media. And surely the fall of Lula da Silva's government had something to do with the popularity of the right wing. Not to mention, their economic rise has since stalled.
It's not at all a given that Trump's rise was not due to social media, it is the very crux of this argument. What do you think is more likely, that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because Trump was popular, or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil and the US?
> As for France, the current Le Pen's own father made it to the second round of presidential elections as early as 2002
And that election ended with a 82% win for Chirac. I feel that both here and in many other places your arguments can be boiled down to "other factors than social media exist" and "crazy people/political movements existed before social media". Both are truisms. Yet we see their influence rising recently. The issue is not that people like Glenn Beck always existed, it is that they are electing presidents.
> It's not at all a given that Trump's rise was not due to social media, it is the very crux of this argument. What do you think is more likely, that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because Trump was popular, or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil and the US?
Trump's rise was aided, fueled by social media, but it was not singularly caused by social media. Despite being the ultimate outside president, Trump has been involved in politics for decades as a donor. He had a brief third party presidential campaign in 2000. He moderated a Republican primary debate for the 2012 elections. In terms of playing populist fringe conspiracy theory movements, he was a major figure in the Birther movement during the Obama administration. He didn't spring from nowhere from the forehead of the Twitter.
Furthermore, Trump being a celebrity and highly public figure for decades is also pertinent. He was on a highly-watched network TV reality show prior to his presidential run. He was a household name. And most importantly, traditional news stations aided and abetted his rise. CNN devoted massive amounts of free airtime to covering the Trump campaign as rating bait during 2015 and 2016:
The role of traditional media during that election can absolutely not be discounted. If millions of older, less online voters saw Trump's scandals and excesses on cable news just as they did on social media, you cannot single out social media as the sole cause of Trump's rise. Cable news networks were falling over themselves to chase the same engagement incentives as social media likewise does with clickbait.
> or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil
What's most likely is that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because he is popular there. And that is both because of activity on social media, and activity offline. And the similar phenomena in highly disparate countries, the populist push, might be helped along by social media, but is not solely responsible by social media.
> And that election ended with a 82% win for Chirac.
And regardless of how this year's election will go (fwiw, Macron is currently leading Le Pen in the forecasts), Macron still won in 2017, a year in which social media existed, 66.1% to 33.9%.
> I feel that both here and in many other places your arguments can be boiled down to "other factors than social media exist" and "crazy people/political movements existed before social media". Both are truisms.
And they are true.
> Yet we see their influence rising recently.
Social media is the newest form of media, but it is still a medium just like all of the media that have been affected politics in the past.
Ross Perot was at times polling as the front-runner in the 1992 presidential election; he then suspended and then un-suspended his campaign and still got nearly 19% of the popular vote anyway. As a third-party independent outsider candidate, he gained immense traction even before the existence of social media; he bought out TV airtime and aired infomercials about his platform.
> The issue is not that people like Glenn Beck always existed, it is that they are electing presidents.
Before Trump there was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, a man who had just as many personal scandals as Trump and was literally a media tycoon. A figure who while far from a political neophyte when he became prime minister, similarly had his name blanketed throughout TV airwaves using populist rhetoric. Trump is far from the first national leader of his kind.
Also, as a quibble, Beck became a fairly anti-Trump figure in 2016 and as a consequence, is no longer a leading conservative talking head leading light.
Populists have always existed. Mass communications have existed throughout the twentieth century. The intermix of both have existed since radio populists in the 1930s. Social media is a powerful medium, but it is one of many. To assign it some sort of exceptionalism is to be myopic of history.
(Celebrity candidates have also always existed. This whole discussion subthread was about the 2000s. Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor? Surely having preexisting name recognition and being a popular public figure can lead to victory, even in the absence of any sort of executive experience?)
In modern times, if we hear about a political campaign with a large spending budget, we automatically assume it to be in a leading position. Why? Because that war chest can be used to buy internet ads, TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, billboard ads, fliers, and armies of volunteers to knock on doors. If a cause is everywhere in the consciousness of voters, then it has a higher probability of being supported by those voters. So why what makes social media any different? It would seem the major difference is that social media is unregulated, unlike those older traditional forms of media. It does not have the same of set of restrictions for political advertising, and thus content gets propagated and can be much wilder. (And there is so much of it.) So yes, social media and its effects on political discourse should be studied, and it should be regulated to be more in line with other forms of media, at least the major platforms.
But it's not magic. It doesn't automatically win or lose elections all on its own. And going back to the point of this entire subthread, plenty of factors existed to cause tempers to run hot and become to become internally divided beyond social media. I maintain again that social media is no different than FOX News or pre-social media online forums that existed in the 2000s. They are accelerants that speed up an already-burning fire.
Many of the things you list were not fully and uncontroversially understood to be bad decisions until the end of the 2010s, so by analogy let's wait and see what we're saying in 2030 before we declare the 2010s to be an improvement over the 2000s.
You're not wrong. If anything, much of the most glaring political and cultural fiascos of the past decade were just exaggerated echoes of the previous decade.
I don't think it is safe to say that more independents means less partisanship. If people are going independent because they see themselves as somewhere between Rs and Ds, then sure. But if they go independent because they think the Rs are not right enough, or the Ds are not left enough, then that is only an example of magnifying partisanship.
I view the "independent" label to actually just mean "my party isn't part of my identity." Most "independents" consistently vote for one party, they just aren't married to it in principle.
I agree. In many places you have to pick a party to be able to participate in their primary. So officially you might be listed as a certain party, but still be "independent" as you describe.
This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt.
If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.
This idiocy was all organized on social media. The convoys are overwhelmingly unpopular among larger Canadian society, but social media allowed them to organize in an echo chamber.
No comment on Germany, but I would be betting on things being similar there, not different.
My personal theory is that before social media, a lot of the people involved in this would have been bullied or shamed into not doing this by their peer group. But social media lets you set your peer group without geographical restrictions.
It isn't immune, but it certainly hasn't gotten to the point it has in the US. We had a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people. The truck convoy was a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way by going to Ottawa and being absolutely obnoxious --- and ultimately failing because no one wanted to put up with their shit.
Social media is a factor. It's not the main factor, and Haidt's weird focus on it rather than deeply entrenched and growing economic disparities, lack of education in the US, the rise of the religious right, and other factors is in my view kinda silly.
Canada literally had to suspend the charter and due process by enacting the emergency measures act, which is unprecedented amongst western countries. Why would the government do that if no one supported them anyways?
Your insurrection did not kill 5 people by the way. I get that there's a weird urge to make that event some sort of insanely important historical moment but it doesn't mean you have to make up dead people.
Ironically, from a neutral outsider view, what happened on the 6th of January can also be described as "a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way and being absolutely obnoxious". It doesn't look that way when you are knees deep in american partisan culture wars, but Americans have a tendency to think that anything that happens in the US is exceptional and unique.
And of course there are others. The US has quiet a bit of history around suspending rights.
This is the issue I have with these kinds of statements of, the sky is falling, this hasn't happened before. A co-worker did the same with masks. Masks mandate are the most egregious thing the US government has ever done. But apparently putting people born and raised in the US with Japanese ancestry in camps was less egregious than masks? States banned the use of the German language? The house unamerican activities committee ruined the lives of people by dragging them infront of congress for character assassination?
> > Canada literally had to suspend the charter and due process by enacting the emergency measures act, which is unprecedented amongst western countries
> And of course there are others. The US has quiet a bit of history around suspending rights.
> This is the issue I have with these kinds of statements of, the sky is falling, this hasn't happened before. A co-worker did the same with masks. Masks mandate are the most egregious thing the US government has ever done. But apparently putting people born and raised in the US with Japanese ancestry in camps was less egregious than masks? States banned the use of the German language? The house unamerican activities committee ruined the lives of people by dragging them infront of congress for character assassination?
If you had to go back to 1862 you are proving my point. Canada didn't even exist then. I guess I should have specified "never happened post ww2".
I totally agree with your second point, I'm not saying that the measures were worse. The suspension of rights is though; the issue isn't really the mask/vaccine mandate it was the reaction to the protests against them.
You generalized to "western countries." I don't think Canada is the only "western country." That is the main issue.
It could be this was a first for Canada (not Canadian so I am not aware of a lot of it's history), but definitely not for western countries in general.
> Canada literally had to suspend the charter and due process by enacting the emergency measures act, which is unprecedented amongst western countries. Why would the government do that if no one supported them anyways?
Probably because they didn't have to deal with a large number of numpties doing that before.
> Your insurrection did not kill 5 people by the way.
There were five deaths. One was from gunshot and the others were from other reasons. The fact that the deaths occurred among the insurrectionists doesn't change the fact that people actually died as a result of what happened, which from what I can tell is more than can be said about the numbskull protests in Ottawa.
> Ironically, from a neutral outsider view, what happened on the 6th of January can also be described as "a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way and being absolutely obnoxious".
Was some high-profile Tory premier instigating the protests in Ottawa with a rally there? Were his own officials involved in the planning? Was there a large number of people breaching the Canadian parliament building while it was in session? Were extreme right MP's feeding information to convoy organizers on where Trudeau was? Because while that's not what happened in Canada, it's what happened in the US a year ago.
I get what you are saying about Americans thinking anything in the US must be exceptional. I've seen that before myself, especially with certain members of my family. But there is a difference between idiot protesters occupying a capital city's downtown and having to be forced to leave and an attempted self-coup by an outgoing head of state.
>Probably because they didn't have to deal with a large number of numpties doing that before.
So, the government can suspend rights of the people, while they are using those rights to protest? Is it only okay when the government does it if you "agree" with it?
Convenient.
That's not a good excuse, or reason - the government willy nilly choosing to enforce and invalidate it's own restrictions and human based rights based on "political feeling."
>There were five deaths. One was from gunshot and the others were from other reasons. The fact that the deaths occurred among the insurrectionists doesn't change the fact that people actually died as a result of what happened, which from what I can tell is more than can be said about the numbskull protests in Ottawa.
While not supporting the insurrectionists/protestors, I still do not see any mention of other riots that happened during 2020 which, IMO were far more deadlier, at 25 from direct physical violence on both sides - the protesters and law enforcement.
> Ironically, from a neutral outsider view, what happened on the 6th of January can also be described as "a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way and being absolutely obnoxious".
Pretty much any coup attempt in history can be described like that. You can insult those people or underplay attempt to overthrow election as "being obnoxious" pretty much always.
I wonder what you think about other riots and events. You do know the history of the United States is one that supports insurrection (from the English Monarchy) and those rights are protected by the bill of rights?
"Social media is a factor. It's not the main factor, and Haidt's weird focus on it rather than deeply entrenched and growing economic disparities, lack of education in the US, the rise of the religious right, and other factors is in my view kinda silly. "
The newspaper and printing press back in the day was the social media equalizer. What about pamphlets like Common Sense by Thomas Paine? Was education more common back in those times than today? The average American in a day reads more information/published material than an "American" back in 18th century, or even 19th century.
Was there no religious fueled political class back in the 17th century? Isn't the point of Freedom of Religion?
Even going back, what about the availability of the Bible to the masses vs just the "educated" clergy.
What system is better than the one now, where people are free to come together to support their own notions and beliefs?
--
Reading your reply, and other generalized replies from other people with the same viewpoint is shocking. It feigns complete insight in the "other side" or that people can have different opinions but still come to the same conclusion or end goal.
It is this type of post that creates a "THEM" narrative blame game. It shouldn't be an US vs THEM - or Me vs You.
That's what makes Social Media so powerful, people are divided into their beliefs and opinions and then go seek people to re-enforce those those ideas because they are pushed from one extreme to another. It's the same with Pro Obesity groups, Pro Ana groups, Pro Sexual Fetish Groups, etc.
It warps what was normal into a narrow individual experience. That's only possibly by the ease of entry of social media vs, what was essentially a web ring back 20 years ago and needing to know a bit of html to host a page on geocities.
>> We had a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people.
Every time I see this I just think it is peak “American exceptionalism”. You had a small group of red necks, who had what could barely be described as a riot, who walked into the government building and vandalised it a little. It was not an “insurrection”. That is language that was used specifically to create more division and fear.
> a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people.
I’m not sure what’s nuttier, the actual event itself or the fact that people still call it an “insurrection”. Either way, you are doing a good job of (unwittingly?) providing evidence for your own points, I guess.
I'm not one to downplay how bad the divisiveness in US politics is, but if you look a bit closer you'll see the EXACT same dumbsh*t happening in DE and CA, perhaps with less obviousness.
Take a closer look at what is happening in Germany's armed forces, Canada's use of emergency powers to remove...truckers.
The world has lost its collective mind, just as sure as if The Singularity or First Contact was happening tomorrow.
Meaning, the promise of the open 'net has been subverted and this is what we get. Facebook Pograms, the O.J. of NYC (Orange Joke) becoming PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, VV thinking he's the second coming of Ivan the Terrible.
This would all honestly make a lot more sense if Terry Crews was President.
Odd comment coming the day after far right and far left candidates won more than half the votes in the French presidential election, with the center left and right collapsing and centrist Macron getting under 30% (despite having moved significantly to the right on cultural issues).
France has its own issues as well, in many ways parallel to the US from what I have heard, with a sharp urban-rural divide and a legacy of colonialism that has largely not been addressed.
I mean yeah if you dismiss or downplay the issues every other country has, the US looks unique. But that's not exactly meaningful right? Also, considering what's happening in france, do you agree that your original comment was not accurate?
I can only speak for Germany, but Social media here still is much, much less widely adopted than in the US, because sharing one's life with strangers is culturally not as well regarded as it is in the US. This also applied before social media - telling one's life story to strangers was just not done.
Now, this is changing for younger generations, but even they are still not nearly as willing to share as their American counterparts.
It may just be a matter of time but here the Q-Anons and other divisive, Anti-Democratic groups are still more fringe than over there
That last part is only true if you completely ignore the Querdenker movement, which has overlaps (or at least "strategic alliances") with the far-right and QAnon.
What Germany is lacking in social media it makes up for in WhatsApp status updates and Telegram groups. The landscape is less homogeneous in Germany with only a minute fraction of people using Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok for example, but you're extremely underselling the overall magnitude.
There's a ouroboros of sharepics and clips spreading between Facebook/Instagram and WhatsApp/Telegram and vice versa dragging in additional people in every rotation. Instagram sharepics being shared in Telegram groups, TikTok clips showing up in WhatsApp status updates, and so on, often with direct links back to the source so people can jump right into the funnel.
I've seen it with the anti-mask and anti-vax protesters, now I'm seeing it with pro-Russian propaganda. Meanwhile the Querdenker movement seems to be slowly rebranding as a "peace movement", but always with the same broad strokes messaging to distrust the government and to be critical of every party other than the AfD. Whether it's anti-queer, anti-vax or "anti-war", the ideology is fungible and arbitrary, but the underlying message remains the same.
Has Germany seen the same rise in young people adopting strongly entrenched positions on racial identity politics and not tolerating a diversity of opinion? E.g are undergraduates trying to ban speakers they disagree with? Can a person under the age of 40 voice agreement with a traditional feminist like JK Rowling without being socially and professionally ostracized?
It's not appropriate to downvote this. It was simply a question. A good-faith, politely-made, relevant, question. Please answer it or otherwise contribute substantively if you wish to participate in the subthread.
(Don't bother telling me it's against site guidelines to question downvotes; I know that. Just downvote this if you feel the need. The reason I am breaking the site guidelines in this instance is that I suspect that the fact that the only response to my question is downvotes is a symptom of exactly the problem being discussed in TFA.)
By "good faith" I mean that I was genuinely and sincerely curious about whether cancel culture etc was more or less common in Germany than in anglophone countries such as UK, USA and Canada. What do you mean by "good faith"?
You're not familiar with the rise of "cancel culture" in the UK, USA, and Canada, and its association with "progressive" left-wing politics? I would love to not be familiar with that! Where do you live?
Does the USA have a common national identity to rally around anymore; what do a Floridian, a California, and Minnesotan have in common in the 2020's? America has always been a melting pot of different cultures. You can tell a story about how the "american dream" united Americans in the past but you can also argue that dream has been degraded over the years. Even things such as the constitution and bill of rights are being disputed in various ways.
Funny thing is local politics is dying. Your hypothetical statesmen are rallying around how much they hate the other political party, and what they are trying to use the federal gov't to accomplish. That Floridian basically has everything in common with that Californian, as long as they are on the same side of the political divide (give or take one or two "contarian" positions within the tent).
> In the US the division is arguably worse and the masks are coming off.
You sure about that? As recently as 1995, Canada was with 0.4% of a vote to split the country in two.
In the 1970's the deputy Premier of Quebec was kidnaped and murdered by Quebec separatists.
In 1990 the Canadian and Quebec governments used the military and authorized lethal force to put down an armed rebellion by the Mohawk tribe, after a Canadian court allowed the development of a golf course on native land.
Just because Canada is largely ignored by the American and International media, doesn't mean that everything is lovely and everyone is sitting around singing kum ba yah.
Yeah and even when there was literally hundreds of armed men and a confrontation against the Canadian army... the Canadian government still did not invoke the emergency measure act. They were also blocking crucial bridges into montreal for weeks, killed a police officer and set up a no man's land... yet after multiple weeks they still negotiated a peaceful settlement and kept talking to Mohawk Leaders.
Just goes to show how insanely irresponsible the current federal governement's handling of the trucker rally has been in comparison.
(That doesn't mean I'm not sympathetic to the Mohawk cause, or that I think the federal government should have used force against them.)
I think we are all a little anxious, and trigger happy. Our police, our politicians.
It's like as soon as something remotely similar to a movie they've seen happens everyone thinks, "omg it's happening!" Civil war is happening, just like in the movies. Time to invoke the emergency act.
People seem to have little patience these days to actually think things through. You have people like Trudeau running away and pretending to be sick instead of dealing with issues head on. Either they're out of touch, or something worse.
Are you intimately familiar with modern life in the US and (Germany/Canada)? Because divisions you see from the inside might not be obvious from the outside.
New Zealand had the front lawn of its parliament occupied by a combination of anti-vax, pro indigenous rights (which I support, adding them here because they were a major contingent), some pro trump MAGA types and natural healing types (hippies) for over two weeks before police removed them. This was nominally because they wanted the vaccine mandates removed but soon devolved into general anti-establishment sentiment.
>Canada hasn't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has
Canada is, politically, even more harshly-divided than the US is. We even have specific political parties for it: the Quebec Party, the Western Party, and the Largest Cities Party (the latter two will deny this, but that's the truth). Quebec has tried to separate from Canada twice in the last 50 years, and was within a Brexit's margin of their latest attempt not succeeding- for all Texas' bluster, they haven't even come close to this.
What makes the division worse here is that the stakes are raised higher- our legislature is unicameral, the executive is formed as a consequence of the vote breakdown for the legislature, every single vote is along party lines, and there's effectively no constitution (as an American would understand it).
The rough equivalent in the US is if there was no Constitution, and NYC and DC picked every single representative, senator, and the President.
The difference is that the average American would go to war if that happened, and the rhetoric downstream of that property makes their division look worse than it is; it's the opposite in the other parts of the world that are more stereotypically concerned with looking polite and respectable.
Under the electoral college system if California had the majority of the population they would pick the president. Wouldn't matter if it was 51-49 percent in California and 0-100 in every other state.
Under a popular vote California or NYC or DC wouldn't pick anything. States wouldn't vote, people would. One person, one vote no matter where you live.
Netherlands was barely able to form a government, took around 6 months I think and it seems shaky. Belgium, well ...has its own issues. UK - pretty polarized (Brexit was around 50% split), France - rise of the far right, Israel - election every 6 months, and so on and so on.
Germany is 87% not just white but European white. 74% of those are ethnic Germans. Gini is 0.816
Canada is 72.9% European white and Gini is 0.728
The U.S. is 60% non-Hispanic white and Gini is 0.852
These numbers don't capture everything (e.g., distribution going in to Gini is important), but they do capture a lot. I think the conversation could do without the race-baiting, too :-(
Oh no, the rest of the planet isn’t immune to this. We, in France, will choose our next president in two weeks between a man who spent the last 5 years breaking all the public services he could or an openly fascist woman.
The EU countries just have more social safety nets that renders them more socially solid. So we are not doing as bad as America right now but don’t be fooled, the trend is the same one.
Pretty much. If you look at other EU countries, social media was essential in dividing the populations and promoting populist, nationalistic and xenophobic parties.
Was social media the cause of the division, or did it merely allow people to exploit existing problems?
Assuming that social media is a primary factor, for the sake of argument, the solution to this problem isn't regulating the platforms via Haidt's proposals (which I should add seem to be too limited in effect). Instead, we should decentralize the platforms into protocols. While this will still allow stupid people to go into echo chambers (like with any forum or blog online) it will also limit their reach by depriving them of a singular place for a giant number of people to hear them all at once.
We can spend forever debating this, or we can use our common sense that anything Zuckerberg touches is bad for society and probably causing deep rooted issues.
Look, we can spend hundreds of years debating over which foods are bad for us and which are good, or we can just use our common sense and cut out sugars and bad oils. That'll solve 90%.
Why waste time waiting for glacier-speed science to figure this out when we have this common sense. Stop anyone on the street and ask them if they think constant notifications, scrolling, phone addiction and apps like tinder, TikTok and Instagram are good for our brains.
I'd be sad if people didn't unanimously agree that it's poison
This thread is the prototypical example of what Haidt is talking about. I have no interest in taking part in this comments section other than to make this observation.
> This thread is the prototypical example of what Haidt is talking about. I have no interest in taking part in this comments section other than to make this observation.
One could make the exact same claim about your snarky comment right here. If you actually had no interest in taking part in the discussion, you wouldn't have taken part, but here you are. One of us.
Well HN is part of the problem isnt it?
This platform may be one of few that allows difference of opinions in the threads but it it still very much just a subset of reddit users.
With the same tendency to agree with anything progressive and attack all other points of view.
Post covid era societal destruction, aka actually starting to face the devastating consequences of the extreme C19 responses, has softened a whole lot of progressives around me at least.
And its easy to tell from the dominishing support of extremeist progressive commentary in HN for the past 6 months or so.
That being said I adore HN. Fun random articles.
Comments sections seem to leak into reddit territory but maybe that will resolve itself.
HN is not ad much fun for those seeking outrage as reddit.
I liked the article. He is progressive but at least he had the guts to timidly criticize his own tribe for the current state of the political divise.
People aren't desperate in the West, not by a long shot. It's popular to complain in this particular way, but it just isn't borne out by facts.
We are so rich that our poor are chronically fat. Even very poor people have very high standards of material living. Refrigerators, televisions, heat, etc. Many people in the world do not have these things still. There are people for whom lifespans are limited by things other than diseases of wealth (i.e., obesity).
The basic problem at the core of your complaint, I think, is a too-uneven distribution of social status. The basic cause is is keeping up with the Joneses. You and I measure our social status relative to that of the other people we observe (both in person and via electronic media). It is entirely possible to be a person of very high social status who views himself as rich and privileged, but who nonetheless has a considerably lower material standard of living than even poor Americans. This could be a chief in a small-scale society, for instance. He can be king of his local mountain, but die early of easily preventable disease
(There are other likely perks to his position that poor Americans won't usually get, though, like good mating opportunities and ample leisure time)
> Even very poor people have very high standards of material living.
True, but their standard of living is still worse than that of their parents which is what I believe OP is trying to convey.
It's no longer possible for an assembly line worker to own a modest home; care for a stay-at-home-spouse; raise two children; go on a modest vacation once per year; save a little bit to deal with unexpected costs; and retire with a modest pension.
This, more than anything else, is the fundamental cause of division in the US. It's what Michael Moore is highlighting in Roger & Me. It's the—now broken—social contract Gen X and Millennials were raised to trust.
The ideological division we see today existed before the social contract was broken, but most people were too busy living their lives to care.
I haven't looked too closely into this, but I'd bet that the total KKK membership count tracks pretty closely to the amount of economic stress experienced by the median American.
> We are so rich that our poor are chronically fat
Obesity overwhelmingly affects the very more than it affects the rich. They're also the who lose their legs to diabetes when they can't afford medical treatment.
Basically, having access to calories does not mean that one is "rich" in any way, it's almost totally unrelated.
Also with productivity gains, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage of half a century ago is the same as it was in 2018, and it has popped slightly up and down since the . All gains have been sucked up by the heirs, the aristocracy.
I should've specified whether it was 1956 dollars or 2022 dollars. "Real" means inflation-adjusted. I was thinking of 2022 dollars, so you can't have the automobile.
Were we doing it the other way around, $1000 1956 dollars is only $10,700 2022 dollars. You might be able to get a car for $1k in 1956, but it's going to be strictly worse than a 2022 car--the two things aren't comparable. Which is a large part of my point.
Then I'll take three sets of skirts and dresses (total $30), made of cotton and available in size 16(!) (not a plus size, just, in the regular size lineup!). I'll take a grocery shopping trip, which not only will cost me less than $10 but all of the food will be local and in-season. And I'll take a month of rent in Montreal ($60) to round it out.
If you prefer, I could have blown it all on a single college course, but that seems to belie the idea of a basket. :P
The declining prices are primarily in durable consumer goods, fuel energy, and consumer electronics. Food, healthcare, education, and rent (the things you need to live) have far outpaced "inflation" -- and this is more relevant to the average person because you don't buy a TV every year, but surely you buy bread every week.
That car from 1956 would look cool, assuming everyone else wasn't driving the same thing, but would be objectively worse in almost every way compared to the cars of today.
"He noted that distributed networks "can protest and overthrow, but never govern.""
That's exactly right. Except it seems, so far, like those who effectively control the networks by acting as intermediaries between its users, can suppress protest and protect themselves from being overthrown.
Because we’ve massively overinvested as a society in trivial meta navel-gazing like The Atlantic, and massive underinvested in technically knowledgeable conversation, teaching, and execution.
Overall, red side wants things to stay the same or go back, and blue side wants things to change. If the gap between them is widening, it's because blue side is trying to change things too rapidly. Red side seems to want to go back to 1950 at the earliest; it doesn't seem to me like they're increasingly backing up into 1800s or earlier. But the blue side is increasingly pushing for things that many are not ready to even consider: children transitioning into other genders, reparation-like policies, socially enforced changes to fundamentals of language. Many reds are still getting used to the last changes, like gay marriage. Society is just not set up to handle constant massive change to traditional mores. You can have one or two things change in a decade and people will adapt, but the current velocity is not sustainable.
FYI trans children are not new and minors have been transitioning in the US for the last 50 years. It's only more recently that it has been turned into a vile political issue by the right.
As a transgender person who was once a child but was not aware of the possibility of transitioning back then, I would have loved the opportunity to do so.
Nice try, but unfortunately I'm one of those people who reads books about topics they disagree with. I've read that book already, and it's disingenuous bordering on a lie to imply that what was happening decades ago to children as cited in that book is at all close to modern full transitions, nor were the motivations the same.
Put your finger on the median democrat line, leave it where it starts in 1994 and remember where republicans are in 1994 and 2017.
There is no question the democrats moved left, republicans followed and then moved right back to where they were. The democrats than moved further and further left.
>You can have one or two things change in a decade and people will adapt, but the current velocity is not sustainable.
You are describing the culture wars that are over. What we reached now isn't so much this. Social factors aren't even a huge consideration. It's about UBI. It's about wealth redistribution. It's about people who ignored advice, got a liberal arts degree putting $50,000 in debt and can only pay the interest payments from their mcjob.
I figure there was a period in time when this political division would turn into a civil war... but it won't.
Imagine the democrats clean sweep the midterms in november.
Imagine the republicans clean sweep the midterms in november.
What do you think happens in either of those cases?
Social media companies encourage manufactured outrage by providing controversial and divisive 'extreme' content for "engagement metrics". We know this from the Facebook leaks, court cases and common sense.
The solution to this suggested in this article is to give them more power over individual information by making giving your name and address to the company mandatory. No thank you. I don't think expanding one of the core parts of the problem while annihilating the capability for people in repressive countries to shield themselves is any solution at all.
If anything, enforcing identification would be very damaging to these companies. Their user numbers are absurdly inflated by bots and fakes, and most of their engagement is also likely not coming from human activity. The author is not proposing a solution for people in oppressive regimes - those are already restrained in their access to internet and social media -, but for America.
i feel like i'm out of touch. the premise is that most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage? even in 2022, it's not hard to find people who don't talk partisan politics. it's not hard to find people who value epistemics. the web-like portions of the internet make this easy. Google "rationalist community" and the first result is LessWrong. Google "neutral political news" and you get allsides.com. moreover, find just one person associated with a single thing you value and you can connect with them, chat with or browse who they're following, and recurse connections until you've embedded yourself in an environment of people you enjoy associating with.
this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.
>most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage?
It gets dragged in a lot of places whether you want it or not.
For example, I saw a discussion recently on a real estate forum where someone stated that US demographics show the population is about to tank and so real estate prices will crash when there are too many houses for the smaller population. Someone else pointed out the prediction wasn't compensating for illegal immigration and immediately the brigade went into action accusing them of being a republican.
Even on motorcycle forums with regard to Chinese-manufactured bike engines and whether you're supporting the CCP by buying one, etc. It feels like it's getting unavoidable.
I wish the article had expanded a little more into the political aspect of the past 10 years: Occupy had a passing mention, but deserves a deeper analysis.
The populist movements of Occupy Wallstreet and its more effective mirror image - the Tea Party - were a direct result of distrust of the "system" (i.e. government, politicians and corporate America) in the aftermath of the great recession where people observed large-scale foreclosures, while the government was pouring billions to bail-out corporations and, justice wasn't seen to be done regarding those who precipitated the crisis.
Social media didn't help,but IMO, trust in institutions was severely eroded and a lot of people felt left behind by the unevenly-distributed "recovery", which splintered people into self-reinforcing ideological echo-chambers.
The third act was the Trump presidency, and I have nothing to say which hasn't been said before about polarization in that era.
Given that the government was selling crack in the 90's I don't think an observer from the future would seize on this era in particular for that sort of thing. It's just a piece of glass.
They will absolutely study the use of sound bites/memes like this one in political discussions though.
The "but that's definitely untrue", "yeah, ok, but ... you know what I mean, right?" type comments build a very interesting context for these weird talking point memes.
> That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.
10 years later, Google Translate is still not dependable in real world colloquial usage ( I moved abroad ). It works for simple things, but the risk of miscommunication is way too high. I’ve learned ( been trained) to restructure my sentences in less idiomatic ways to get Google to make sense, but it’s still a dice roll . There are certain ideas that are practically unreachable. Knowing the local language grammar a bit, you rely on Google translate for bits and pieces, then compose sentences / ideas / communication yourself.
The title has a very "make America great again" vibe. When exactly and in what way was the past better?
> One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
A consistent set of lies told to our children while they are impressionable? I'm not sure I'm willing to mourn that without some extraordinary evidence that it's causing harm. I don't really see the connection to social media, and the decades long battle over teaching evolution suggests it's not new.
Cannot recall anytime in modern history in which a major political party is influenced and supported by an ethereal conspiratorial group that only "exists" on-line and in the minds of its followers. A fanatical follower even showed up at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6/21 dressed in a shaman costume.
Social media thrives on the concept of "followers", which sounds more like a "grooming" stage for authoritarians.
A contrarian take focuses on the increasing specialization of knowledge and the increasingly fine-grained international division of labor, which has had increasing impact on a government that fails to keep up. A rough history of that:
In the 1700s the Western democracies established nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislatures.
In the last 1800s, given the increasing specialization of knowledge, the first committees are established. At first this process is ad-hoc, one-off, disorganized, and often viewed as temporary.
By the early 1900s it is clear that the system of highly specialized committees are the only way for the legislatures to keep up with the rapidly growing complexity of society.
By the 1930s, in the USA, there is the growing sense that the general assembly of Congress should only act as a rubber stamp for the committees. All intelligent laws come from committees. In the rare case that a law comes from some random Congressperson, rather than a committee, their law is assuredly badly written, and full of unintended consequences. All good laws from committees, without exception.
In 1946 the committee system reaches the peak of its prestige and intellectual coherence with the Congressional Reorganization Act:
If you follow the trend line, from 1850 to 1950, and then you project that trend line into the future, it seems clear that somewhere around 1970 or 1980 there should have been a Constitutional amendment that shifted the power to make law from the Congress to the committees. A possible system that could have worked well is if the Congress continued to exist only to appoint people to committees, and then the committees themselves gained the power to make law. Rather than asking Congress to act as a rubber stamp, Congress would simply lose its traditional powers, which would shift to the committees.
Such a change would have formalized the idea that we live in a complex and highly specialized world, very different from the world of the 1700s, and so only a system of highly specialized committees can offer good government.
The failure to push forward with necessary constitutional change means that the whole system began to stagnate, and then it became vulnerable to the accusation that the government no longer worked (more and more pundits then began to suggest that the answer was less government, rather than fixing the process of governance).
The committee system was still widely respected till the 1990s. It is often said that Newt Gingrich, when he gained power in 1994, began an attack on the committee system. His goal wasn't great government, so it served his purpose to undermine the whole system.
There is universal agreement that the committee system is less important now than it was 30 years ago. Republicans have lead the way with a populist style of government in which laws are pushed forward from the floor of Congress, rather than from the committees. Many of these laws seem to be designed to function more as attention getting devices, rather than functioning first and foremost as instruments of governance.
If you buy this line of thinking, the answer is to declare the 1700s officially over and close down the nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislature, and implement a system of committees, with the committees holding all of the traditional legislative functions.
This would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is difficult in the USA.
Any Constitution can be transformed into any other Constitution by way of amendment, and therefore, in a sense, there is only one fundamental question of Constitutions, and that is how can they be amended. Every society needs to find a balance between stability and flexibility; every society needs to adapt to change while keeping the important fundamentals solid. Therefore there must be some ideal amount of time over which Constitutional change should play out. Too fast and it might be too easy for one moment of public hysteria to sweep away everyone's civil rights, but if too difficult, then people begin to ignore the Constitution because it no longer matches people's actual needs.
What is the ideal speed at which a Constitution should evolve? At the current moment, the world offers us two countries as examples of the dangers of the two extremes: Hungary and the USA. In Hungary it turned out to be too easy to amend the Constitution, while in the USA it has turned out to be too difficult to amend the Constitution.
I wrote an analysis of Hungary versus the USA, which got a lot of comment when I first wrote it. For anyone interested, it is here:
The committee chairs were very powerful people, especially in the House. Of these Ways and Means, where tax legislation originated, is probably the most important. Wilbur Mills, who was chair for 20 years, was a very important person indeed.
Easy amendments: While often not exactly amendments, the ballot propositions in various states function in the same way; usually, as you say, "[the] law is assuredly badly written, and full of unintended consequences".
This is an excellent article - thanks for sharing. This decline of shared common reality and social trust has been both frightening and frustrating for me.
Modern life has been on a trajectory for this tribalist bubble warfare since we outgrew small village life. The car and mobility for employment put the icing on the cake.
If we want social cohesion, design for it, in real life.
Oh baby clutch those pearls tight with your wringed hand. So sick of this “it’s not us, it’s them” ignorant, blind, stupid fear mongering. STFU and do something about it. Talk to people on the other team for starters.
That's like telling the Titanic and the iceberg to just talk it out, but nobody is at the helm. This is a problem far bigger than "Just talk to somebody with a slightly different viewpoint!". This is a problem at the root of our society. It's an existential crisis that has been getting worse for decades.
I think a good name for this is 'discontention'. Discontent + contention. People are now dissatisfied with their view of reality being challenged by people they know and talking heads, and because of that there is major contention (in the computer science sense) over what people want the narrative to be, and what decisions they want the people in power to make.
For a long time I have thought Trump being elected was the greatest psy-op of all time. Do you have any idea how much time people spent talking about him, thinking about him, etc? I mean his presidency could have slowed down progress because of that by a percentage point even if you ignore every policy decision he made or opinion he shared. Now people are even more emotional, thus more irrational, and now you are looked down on for not having a strong bias.
There are people who want to centralize power with the unitary executive theory, and make the president even more powerful, because then the president can bypass any level of 'discontention' by the public or other officials. So, basically, my theory is that by creating 'discontention', with either a left or right wing policies or presidents, will always lead to more centralization of power.
Most people define power as the ability to control and influence others. Personally, I define it as resource allocation.
"But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side."
Perhaps the root cause of this is not misinformation but rather the increase in awareness of how corrupt and incompetent some of these systems are.
I've witnessed these things myself related to political figures, police, prosecutors, the judiciary, and the organizations that are supposed to oversee them (the Bar, judicial board, internal affairs, the FBI, attorney general, etc). Rights violations are so common that nobody cares unless they resulted in bodily injury or substantial monetary loss. If nobody is standing up for or enforcing those rights, then do we actually even have them, or are they a fiction?
If the oversight of the people comprising the system is ineffective, then that is what will lead to abuses and this idea that each election is a battle. It seems nobody can enforce the rulers to follow their own rules. And these rulers have consistently granted themselves more power and autonomy throughout history (really surprised they didn't bring this up).
The problem is the stupid bankrupt politics in the USA.
Social media is just gasoline being thrown onto the fire, with the billionaire class pumping as much gas into it as they can.
I think there's one throwaway paragraph in the middle of the whole article that addresses the political shift in the 90s that led us to where we are. That should have been front and center.
The USA needs universal health care, child care and college (and probably UBI) meanwhile the Democratic party has shifted to the right and fully engaged in punching left as hard as it can to avoid this happening, while losing elections to the right wing (which is on a slope towards outright fascism) because they can't deliver anything which significantly moves the needle for the average american. That is why the last 10 years have been particularly stupid. And the one thing that both sides pump up is the social wars and identity politics in order to avoid talking about the economic changes that have to happen.
France, Canada, Britain and many other countries in the West that have everything you listed are also showing the same signs of division, all emerging in the same timeframe described by Haidt.
I mentioned Canada and France. Could also list other countries like Austria and Netherlands that had similar issues. Hell, even Brazil, who had been improving economically and especially for its poorest people consistently since the 90s, and was taken over by a far right government that rose through social media, exactly the way Haidt describes.
My point is that what we are witnessing here is better explained by the sudden access to social media rather than socioeconomic deterioration. By the way, we agree that the working class in the US (and UK) have also experienced a relative decline in the past decades.
The right wing billionaire media blitz really took off with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. That's the engine that has been driving a lot of it, and it is obviously transnational and doesn't know any boundaries (Murdoch is Australian). And it got started in the 90s before most people had discovered the Internet and before social media existed. The shift to neoliberalism also started with Blair and Clinton, but affected most of Europe and the Americas through all of the neoliberal institutions, including the EU, the G7/G8/G20, the WTO, agreements like NAFTA, etc. Social media didn't change the trajectory of any of that, it only accelerated it.
> The shift to neoliberalism also started with Blair and Clinton
No, the left-most party in systems that were right – center or right – center-left getting fully on-board with neoliberalism happened with Blair and Clinton, but neoliberalism dominated the same states from at least Thatcher and Reagan, respectively.
My theory as to what's going on: raging capitalism and corporatism that is worshipped and embraced, social media, rising inequality, and declining education. We slave everything in society, including primary, secondary, and university educations to the drumbeat of capitalism. It is corporatism and capitalism that abuses the right and the evangelical towards their whims. Social media, inequality, and declining education are an amplification feedback loop to all these issues. In addition, technocratic society is also out of control.
Where it really feels like it started was the Democratic exuberance when they got the Presidency + House + 60 senate seats + complete collapse of neo-conservativism in 2009.
Remember “The Death of American Conservativism.” There was a line in there about how it was hard to imagine Republicans using obscure parliamentary tricks to prevent popular legislation from passing.
There's a ton to unpack here. Some select responses:
> ... but many of them have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need to play with one another and go to school ...
I see this repeated a lot and pretty much every time I see it, it is implied that teachers (and, by extension, their families) are expendable. Sure children need socialization (to varying degrees) but someone has to supervise in-school learning. Those teachers are at higher risk than the children are of complications from COVID and their families might be even higher risk. I take exception to this devaluation.
This belies a dark truth of people in general: many people (if not most people) absolutely do not give a fuck about people they don't know if it even mildly inconveniences them.
> Of course, the American culture war and the decline of cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival.
Yes it does. Can you spot the trend [1]?
> The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.
It goes back further than that: White evangenlical institutions were weaponzed to deliberately foment a culture war because of white supremacy and racism. Consider abortion [2]:
> In 1970, a poll conducted by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.
> Three years later, a poll conducted by the Baptist Standard newsjournal found that 90 percent of Texas Baptists believed their state’s abortion laws were too restrictive.
What changed? It's a deep topic but in summary, Brown v Board of Education ended racial segregation in schools. Mississippi tried to get around this with private schools for K-12 education (where the white enrollment in public schools in Holmes County dropped to zero). In 1970, Green v Kennedy prevented such academies from receiving full tax exempt status. Fears of misagenation caused Bob Jones University (under duress) to admit a token handful of (married) black students. Starting in the mid-70s, efforts were made to motivate voters around abortion, which proved successful in the 1978 midterms and probably helped Reagan defeat Carter in 1980 when Carter refused to consider a constitutional amendment banned abortion.
And the rest is history.
But we see this culture war continue to this day as Republicans have been incredibly successful creating wedge issues to motivate their base around trans rights, gay marriage, critical race theory and the like.
A great article which is ruined by politicising it as a "rightwing problem".
Everything the author identifies applies equally to rhetoric from the left, as anyone who has spent time on the r/politics section of Reddit or Twitter will recognize.
I'm not sure where you got that spin from the article, as it seemed fairly balanced to me in pointing out the issues both on the right and on the left.
> Everything the author identifies applies equally to rhetoric from the lef
Looking from the outside (Europe), I'm sorry, but I just don't see this at all.
A big example: Republicans have repeatedly claimed for over a decade now that the Democrats run an international child sex trafficking network
I am in no way a fan of Hillary Clinton, but the right has spent almost forty years systematically lying about her, claiming she's a criminal, and when the whole "Democrats rape children" thing was invented, they dropped her into that.
Tell me - what claim from the left is comparable to this horrific lie?
And I could go on, and on, and on. Republicans claim that the climate change is a hoax, FFS! (I live in the Netherlands, so this is personal to me.)
Your claim "both sides do it" is false and empty. My guess is that you are in fact an American right-winger - is this true?
"Republicans have repeatedly claimed for over a decade now that the Democrats run an international child sex trafficking network"
You're referring to Qanon type people? They are fringe extremists. Why would you group all republicans in with them?
Compare to r/politics section of Reddit, which is a much more mainstream group of people. On that website there are regularly top-voted comments with thousands of "likes" saying all republicans are pedophiles/fascists/racists etc.
The article correctly identifies such rhetoric as poison for the societal good. But both the left and the right have to acknowledge that it exists everywhere in the online discourse.
Roughly 1/3rd of Republicans believe QAnon nonsense. They are actively electing QAnon representatives like MTG and Boebert. The wife of a Supreme Court Justice is a QAnon fanatic.
The "fringe extremists" are taking over the Republican party and aren't all that fringe anymore.
Fair summary of America's disheartening descent into structural idiocy. "Glad" I can see it with the clarity of an outsider, but then again... these things tend to cross the big pond sooner or later at least somewhat, as evidenced by right-wing flareups here in Europe.
Hope we will be able to look back on this with the relief of having overcome a bad dream. Then again, there won't be long until that other crisis hits... and that one's not just happening in the head.
Russia's misinformation campaign against the U.S. is 100% the cause of our current national discord.
Our entire culture has been maliciously and actively poisoned by a proven state sponsored attack on the U.S. and Western Europe. Everything in the past decade needs to be re-evaluated and filtered through the lens of Russian disinformation.
Day in and day out, for over 10 years, the Russian government has been posting millions and millions of divisive and destabilizing messages online, amplifying the most controversial topics and creating true distrust and hatred among fellow Americans. Their efforts happened to occur along with the unprecedented rise of smart phones, which enabled this campaign conceived during the Obama administration, to have success beyond Russia's wildest dreams.
Additionally, there have been thousands of spies sent to the U.S. in order to infiltrate Congressional and Presidential offices, military personnel and business leaders. How many Russian spies have you heard of? Last night I watched PBS Frontline where I learned of yet another one: the former CEO of Overstock's girlfriend was revealed to be a spy by the FBI (Maria Butina). He was the guy funding and pushing for recount efforts like in Arizona. I remember reading about her, but didn't realize the connection with "stop the steal".
We need to respond. Aggressively and radically. We need to pardon the Jan 6th insurrectionists (I'm a liberal Democrat, mind you) and start a national campaign of de-russification. (As someone named Russ, I don't state that lightly. Haha. Sorry dumb joke.)
The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable:
1) I'm oversimplifying or exaggerating.
I'm not. This is all fact.
2) I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm somehow trying to target Republicans because I hate freedom.
I'm not spreading a narrative. I'm trying desperately to understand why articles like this from the Atlantic keep trying to explain the state of the country, when we already know the answer.
When is the majority of the country going to realize we've been played and react appropriately??
I totally agree. What I'm pointing out is the reason they're all paranoid isn't something natural. It's a result of Russian disinformation campaign.
Many of the people who got fooled will go to their graves believing that the election was stolen, etc. We have to accept a certain portion of the populace is a lost cause.
However, everybody else who isn't completely delusional needs to understand what's happening. My honest belief is that if enough people can start to realize the root cause of our current national schism, suddenly things will make more sense.
Eventually there will be enough people on both the left and the right that understand who the real enemy is, and will realize that those pushing for a culture war are doing Russia's work for them.
Hasn't it happened many times throughout history? It might not appear natural as we can identify a direct cause of it.. But who's to say it wouldn't happen in some other form with different actors if it didn't happen with Putin?
Wait, why pardon the Jan 6th people? Just because one's been mislead by misinformation to believe something false doesn't mean that they are blameless for flagrantly breaking the law in response.
I think the idea is to paint Jan 6 as an aberration for which the participants were deliberately mislead by a foreign power and therefore somehow less responsible for their actions.
IMHO its a dangerous step to take. The rule of law is the founding bedrock of civil society where justice needs not only to be done, but seen to be done.
The US hasn't helped itself by having two justice systems, one for the elites and one for the plebs.
I don't think offering an olive branch to people dedicated to the overthrow of elections could possibly work. Not only would it encourage more violence, but it would be a disastrous failure of justice. This was not legit political discourse as some politicians are trying to paint it. Its just a good old fashioned illegal riot.
I'd be happy if something could be offered as an olive branch as long as it fits within the normal sentencing leniency (i.e. suspended sentences, community service etc) other than for violent offenders.
You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was identify already-existing issues and fuel them further.
Saying this: "The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable" is a good attempt but doesn't really work I've found. Of course it's predictable, that doesn't make it incorrect.
Yes you guys have been played, but if you didn't see huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin started to use social media then I don't know what to tell you.
I hope readers here can see that spammers and bad actors have been using social media to affect opinion for years and years before Putin was utilizing them to his benefit. You silicon valley guys set up a system that became doomed to fail. Trump and Putin are just catalyzing an already-collapsing system.
I understand that you are angry, it comes out in your text. But the way out of this is not to add more fuel to the fire unless you want to speed up the natural process of a decaying empire.
Everyone loses faith in their empire eventually. You see it in the increasing selfishness, fear and greed, no?
Killing Putin won't do much at this point except to temporarily satisfy the anger.
An analogy to me is the USA is sick and Putin is just an opportunistic parasite. A strong, healthy host would be able to defend itself.
"2) I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm somehow trying to target Republicans because I hate freedom.
I'm not spreading a narrative. I'm trying desperately to understand why articles like this from the Atlantic keep trying to explain the state of the country, when we already know the answer."
Like a disease, what started from a single cause quickly becomes multifaceted. At that point fixing the original cause is no longer enough. It's useful to know so it doesn't repeat, however.
As you can see in your example, during times of high stress people break down into what they care about most. Some into their love of freedom, others in their need to help. Some take risks under pressure, others hide. You can see the left and right divide based on a few of these and then everyone else gets pulled in by social gravity. Most of us believe what we believe out of loneliness, purpose, identity, not logic.
I am on the other side. I have zero faith in our institutions as they have literally killed my friends and destroyed my life. And so I have adopted a more libertarian perspective since I have experienced more good coming from individuals with good hearts than any of my experiences with our healthcare or education systems.
That doesn't mean I am correct. And I would be incredibly naive to not accept that there needs to be a healthy balance between all.
To add to this.. Us Americans I don't think understand how many other parts of the world don't like us. If you want evidence of this go travel, and see how people treat you, then watch their eyes light up if you tell them you are a Canadian and not American.
If it wasn't Putin it would be someone else eventually. You can't win the whack-a-mole game forever.
Let's say we could repeat things without Putin. Facebook and Google and tech companies would have kept growing naively, making it easier and easier to break the system over time. Eventually some team somewhere would infect social media and use it against the USA.
I would actually argue that when humans are exposed to too much information their ability to make rational decisions actually goes down, and we are more likely to use our emotion to make decisions. If you e ever felt burnt out, and overwhelmed by decisions you'll likely have felt something like this.
It is inevitable in my eyes.
I think us humans make the mistake of thinking history happens because of the names. It doesn't.
> watch their eyes light up if you tell them you are a Canadian and not American.
This is such a cliche. I just deleted a long wordy message as to why, but I've lived abroad, speak Spanish, traveled all over and have tons of extended Canadian family, including my maternal grandmother. This sentiment is 100% not true.
I could be in the middle of Tehran or Cairo and tell someone I'm from California and will inevitably get bombarded with friendly questions and stories about how their aunt visited Vermont once, and have I been there. This is the case anywhere I've gone.
I've personally travelled with Canadians. Trust me, no one's eyes light up outside the English speaking world, if that. "Oh, you're from Calgary? Interesting... Is that on the West Coast? Oh, sort of in the middle. Like near Montana?" I mean, it's Canada.
Also, it's not as if anyone wouldn't already know someone is Canadian. They wear red Maple Leaf patches from head to toe, and will even apply fake maple leaf tattoos.
Anyways, it's completely untrue. The US government may not be the most popular all the time, but Americans are treated just fine.
Lol I literally just did it. I have friends from around the world that talk shit about Americans constantly. They love Canadians.
America and loud obnoxiousness are synonyms in lots of the world. People laugh at loud people and say oh they're probably american.
When I was in Holland this is exactly what my dutch friends said everytime they saw loud people. In Mexico there are lots of resorts where people literally try to get away from Americans. There are places where Canadians are welcome and everyone there tries to shield out Americans from buying property.
It's 100% true. I totally understand why us Americans would have our blinders on about this however.
Ah! OK, I don't agree with you in general, but you inadvertently brought up a good point. There's the perception of Americans online and that in person, and I'm sure Russia has done it everything it can to make sure we're hated abroad as much as possible.
You have a bunch of friends online who think Americans are all fat, loud, obnoxious and ignorant. Join the club. Most Americans think that as well.
In my experience this is more a European thing, I don’t have the same issues elsewhere, and then in the case of Europeans, they have said, you’re not like I expected an American to be, so they recognize their bias.
I met a girl last night in Mexico and she said, "you're not American are you? Americans are loud and they always want the rest of the world to hear them."
This is the sentiment I was trying to express. It's definitely not a cliche. I also find on a slightly related note that a lot of problems on social media are American problems and the rest of the world doesn't really care.
And I feel bad typing this but it's true, and if the USA wants to climb back from its decline it is going to need to get comfortable with reality.
Hate to break it to you but it's true. Been living in 3 different European countries for 25 years and the common perception is that these loud, ignorant tourists making fools of themselves are from the US by default.
As painful as it may sound to you in our eyes America is now a third world country with a Gucci belt.
> huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin
Of course I'm not saying Russia created our national schizophrenia, which stems literally from the birth of the nation, but they sure as hell helped exacerbate the condition. Russia deliberately amplified and inflamed the culture wars so that they could corrupt and weaken the US from within without being noticed. From fake online accounts, to financing fringe candidates and media personalities to hacking and interfering with the 2016 election.
And it worked.
I respect your cynicism and opinion but maybe part of your feelings are a cause of Russia disinformation as well. Are our institutions really that awful? Or do you think so little of them because of relentless negative propaganda?
I agree with you. And yes I could and probably am manipulated to an extent.
But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before.
Example of bad American institutions: physical therapy, high schools, colleges for physical therapists. Food. Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollution, information) they put into them. Not to mention how horribly ignorant people are about their physical health. These are the ones I have noticed.
But also, American kids dont do that badly in international tests. They are not the very bestest best. But everytime there is debate about how bad American schools are, I check the stats and ... they are fairly normal on average for democratic world. The only unique thing is American expectation that they should be totally first in everything and anything less then that is failure.
> Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollution, information) they put into them.
America is the leader of the world in talking about food constantly. Obsessing about it. Going to extreme with diets and making up ones again and again. America does not need more of that. It maybe needs to stop assuming it is and must be "best country in the world" in everything and be willing to learn from elsewhere.
> But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before.
I wrote 'decade' for a reason. :-) The push started during the Obama administration. Before Russia invaded the Crimea, Putin was laying groundwork to soften US resistance.
> You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was identify already-existing issues and fuel them further.
Yes. But also, fuel on fire makes much worst fire and possibly explosion. While the exact same fire with no fuel could be stopped or would stop. And it will be actually interesting to watch what will happen with politics abroad as Russia will have less money.
Putin was shelling money and supported not just parties in America. And I really want to see what will happen with fascist anti-democratic parties in both Eu and America as Russia gets weaker and weaker. At minimum, they will have less resources, which should weaken them.
> Killing Putin won't do much at this point except to temporarily satisfy the anger. An analogy to me is the USA is sick and Putin is just an opportunistic parasite. A strong, healthy host would be able to defend itself.
I dont think this is accurate. Putin is strongman in Russia, changing strongman means change of policy. Things will change, you just dont know how. And quite likely, it would lead to scramble for power among Russia elite and a lot of disarray. Putin is not just opportunistic parasite. Just like Hitler or Stalin or any other leader, he shaped things quite a lot. He was not magician to create everything he wanted, but he absolutely create situation in Russia as it is.
Putin was president for 20 years. The return to ussr methods is very much his doing.
But it's not from Greek mythology is it? It's always Christian mythology that is used in these sort of openers. It's almost always the default goto here. What lessons can we draw from the good book today?
I just want my own land, to do my own shit on, not bother anyone, and not be bothered by anyone. Why is this so hard? Why do we want to be controlling other's actions so greatly through the implied threat of government violence?
Ah, so I'm just a nitwit who is a danger to himself. Got it. That must be why they tax me - they know I can't responsibly handle having disposable income to spend on vices.
It sounds like he's saying the solution is middle of the road centrism? That's not very convincing. Centrism is what we've been trying since after the civil war (minus FDR). The government can do nothing when things are going great. But when purchasing power is down, wealth inequality is high, healthcare/education/everything is more expensive, you can't just sit on your hands and do performative politics.
> red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory
What about the rest of us? Most of us are not partisans fighting a distracting culture war.
First, let's set social media aside and look at traditional media - TV, papers, radio, et al. Most Americans are completely unserved by traditional media. Because it's ad-funded, ads want attention, nothing gets attention like outrage, and it's easy to outrage the partisans.
Given that, the only place we can find news (beyond sports and weather) that is not partisan bear-baiting is in emerging social media. Social media is a threat to traditional media.
Thus we have traditional media (like this article) trying to scapegoat social media, trying to finger social media for the hyper-partisan content-free hellscape that traditional media has become.
This journalist really wrote an entire article about facebook. Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes.
"In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse."
???? People didn't get stupider in the last decade. There is access to more information and education then ever has been. We are slowing coming towards ultimate prosperity. Just look at the response to the Russia-Ukraine war. With technology education has slowly reached every human and everyone is aware of corruption and how war is merely a tool used by the powerful that only results in the rest of society harmed. Look at the reactions to things like abortion or taking rights away from people. There is so much progression yet the author lets his jaded view of Mr.Zuck's actions and his own obsession with social media to recreate this misguided world view. A view where access to political information that doesn't fit his point a view is a world where humans have become stupider.
> Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes.
Because we disagree on the assertion on what everyone can see and understand with their own eyes.
> There is access to more information and education then ever has been.
It's also getting harder and harder to discern malicious disinformation from legitimate information, particularly among those that aren't as technologically literate. The last 6 years have shattered the utopian dream of the internet bringing the world together through shared information. For example, many people still believe that the Newtown massacre, one of the most heinous crimes committed in my lifetime, was a government hoax. This is the opposite of enlightenment.
> We are slowing coming towards ultimate prosperity.
We are reaching levels of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. I'd love to know what metrics you're using to come to that conclusion. The middle class in America is eroding at an alarming rate and more as more people fall into financial insecurity.
"The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter."
I feel sad for this author. Still clinging on to right vs left. Refusing to understand that half of the country voted for the candidate he opposes. Yet he can not make the simple intellectual jump to understand the other side? You really cannot sit in the shoes of Americans who vote differently to you and understand why they feel this way, what their reality is, what their experiences are, what they have been taught? This intolerableness stems from the author's high horse he sits on. This article is merely a reflection of his own lack of intellegence.
You sound so angry here. What are your thoughts on Ray Dalio, polarization?
My thought is that this is a force of nature the USA is up against.
Even in nature before humans, things polarize. There is a balance between the strong and the weak force. Between cooperation and competition. It's when these balances get thrown off we move towards another.
Ironically, it's well known that the side of "Love, Understanding, Sympathy, and Tolerance" understands the other side less than it understands them.
It means the other side has higher actual-empathy (ability to emulate what someone else is thinking/feeling: putting yourself in their shoes).
Refusing to understand that half of the country voted for the candidate he opposes.
No presidential candidate in US history has ever received votes from half of the country, because voter turnout is so low. If you mean half of ballots cast, that's not true in this case either: in 2016 Trump lost the popular vote and nobody won a majority of ballots nationwide.
Random scribbling here, but, i feel like America has been the idiots wearing the dunce cap ongoingly for a long time.
But we're finally seeing some real world events & consequences across the world that mirror our internal battle of values, seeing what heavily regressed shelted "anti-political" naivety & other declared antipathys & worse maledictions happening on the world stage look like, far & wide. It feels like there's a lot more examples of very ethnocentric, me & us thinking playing out on the world stage. Personally I find it scary but I think this system shock has a distinct potential to help the world reflect, to decide on stronger more pan-human values, in the face of these upswelling raging distinctionalisms.
In some ways I do worry, that isolationist & nationalistic programmes may see some sucess. But by & large, I feel that there's some pretty clear moral groundings staking it out, have been for a while, and seeing a lot more cases on the world stage, seeing more consequneces of what exclusivist policymaking really looks like is a painful painful painful lesson, but one that will illuminate & recalibrate us all, will help remind us & scare us our of some of our pervasive & monstrous behaviors.
I have some hope we can keep learning & watching, that the parallax view of other countries undergoing the sick battle for it's soul America has suffered & whether that & the law/system is for a very few or for a general public benefit-- I have hope.it carries the world towards caring & concerns. Tbings seem to decidedly be getting harder & worse. I feel like huddling closer has been a natural response, but ultimately has been tinged with cruelty & defeatism, and that we can start to recognize more how weak & scared & isolated responses- when we see them happening elsewhere- look bad, and dont help. I hope we can see the morality & logic of the situation better, seeing more of the world undergoe it's own self-crisis, it's anti-belief in structure & governance & trying, and find remewed vigor to work collectively for better. Just a hope, a small little one, but it feels so new to me to see this struggle playing out more widely.
> We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress.
100% one of my favorite books to have run into as a youth, a great great materialist philosphy book.
Feels like a very weirdly reductionist take thought, making mock rather than taking seriously what cooperation enabled. There's scant recognition of what zero sum systems are, of how cooperation moves things out of stagnant points into better.
Such a loved text & tbis article starts off paying some respect, but ultimately missing the point so so bad, only starting to re-entertain human possibility.
> Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local. The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations. Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. Our current structure, with a homogenous federal government and nationwide corporations arose against the backdrop of that unity.
What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. Aside from maybe California, our individual states remain vastly less fractious than the nation as a whole. Here in Maryland, for example, our Republican governor has an approval rating over 70% in both rural and urban areas. That's not because the state doesn't have ideological diversity--a third of the state voted for Trump. But the extremes are compressed compared to the nation as a whole--Baltimore isn't San Francisco but neither is Carroll County rural Alabama. Not only that, it's hard to get folks in Carroll County worked up about Baltimore they way they get worked up about San Francisco, and vice versa.