The Democrats do keep people like Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib at a distance. Perhaps you could provide a concrete example during the Biden administration where a specific policy gained traction that was far left of center.
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West Sent: Friday, November 8, 2024 1:02 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How democracies die Agreeing with everything you say. I still believe, however, that unless both sides reject or severely moderate their respective radical fringe, all those who simply want to work to solve hard problems, are spinning their wheels. davew On Fri, Nov 8, 2024, at 12:12 PM, Santafe wrote: This feels a bit to the side of the operative point, to me. The Atlantic article Marcus forwarded was good, and useful. People complaining (very intelligently and groundedly, it seemed to me) about trying to solve problems that they understood well, and getting brushed off or used. That’s not by any means the whole story, but it is part of the important story. Another important part of the story is that the Ds gained vote share with suburban educated whites, while losing it with border Tejanos, various working class, and some others who probably aren’t fascist enthusiasts. And then the big one in the room: why so much noise about amplification of group identification, cultural haranguing, and grievance? Here would be a take: 1. We face some hard problems at the moment. Dealing with border crossing, when the circumstances that drive people to it are getting more intense, is one. Figuring out, politically, how to keep a coalition together to contain the concentration of wealth and power, and the loss of agency for almost-everybody, is another. I’m sure there are more. (There are things like Climate that it is not hard to talk about; we can come back later to how much of the talk is backed up by being concretely useful. Those problems are not at the center of what I write for this note. They apply after you have dealt with the things in this note.) 2. What is true about hard problems? If you try to solve them, often it doesn’t work and you end up frustrated, while the problem hasn’t gone away. You also probably get blamed by anybody somewhat remote, and even some of those who are local. Though if you made an honest, hard, and sensible effort, the others working with you might appreciate you. 3. What do courageous people do w.r.t. hard problems? After being beaten one day, they come back and try again (and probably get beaten again); repeat. But the sense that it is necessary, so you don’t get to drop it, binds them. 4. What is an alternative to courageous work on hard problems? Performative distractions, pandering, lot of focus on grievance as its own end. 5. Who falls for the items in 4? People who aren’t currently underwater dealing with one or another of the hard problems. Up until the recent past and even the present, that has included a lot of suburban educated whites, lots of people in academic environments, people relatively protected in cities. Probably other groups one could argue for. What the Ds have been doing is, of course, complicated and not of just one kind. The ACA did absolute concrete good for some tens of millions of people immediately, and it realigned incentives a little bit so the insurers were more aligned with people who need medical services, and less with those who gouge to provide it. Biden’s spending of federal money on blue-collar, unionized jobs, and re-localization of some production that was hazardous to outsource, did concrete good. It’s all kind of stuff around the edges, as most political activity is, but I give credit to them. One can argue whether electrification is really going to solve important problems (and I know people on both sides of that argument who argue from evidence), but within the choices now, and the mostly-short term of political actors, it seems a legitimate political activity to try to build that out. That’s the good side of things the Ds have done. But a lot of the performative culture stuff, to the extent that it has become excessive (let me speak from the inside of universities, so I remain somewhat concrete), is IMO part of the performative vote-getting from people who want to tell themselves they are being humane, while not getting real about understanding or figuring out how to help with a variety of problems that they themselves aren’t currently drowning in. What would a political organization understand, if it believed it couldn’t hide in performance? Some of these things: 1. Everybody has a limited scope. Like, very very limited. 2. Most people’s scope is limited in horizon in time and in society to the pretty immediate-present and ultra-local network and place. 3. Ergo, nothing coordinated gets done except through putting quite a lot of weight on reputation through some channels. 4. People run across ranges. Some with a lot of time in education, some with little. Likewise for every other dimension of lived development. Most of average ability in thinking, some smarter, some dumber (notably, probably a completely independent coordinate from the former). 5. A livable democratic society, if possible at all, is only possible if people with all those limits can be coordinated to make roughly reasonable choices enough of the time. 6. People won’t trust you on problems they don’t understand, unless you have already built up relations of trust with them by being useful and helpful w.r.t. problems they do understand. Point 6 is the huge one where political groups fail in decadent societies. In societies where the people haven’t all become babies, like those who have known real losses in wars and such, or remarkable cases like Taiwan, getting more of that “my brother’s keeper” impulse active can be easier. In the U.S. it has been very hard, for a long time. It seems desirable to me to give credit for the things really done, but then also to call out the very many areas where political groups went hiding rather than having commitment and courage, and then feel some sense of urgency about the latter. All the other degenerate stuff, the fascist core in the society, etc., are there too, and those were the subjects of other sub-threads. I don’t mean to discount them. But I think they flourished in conditions where the trust and courage had gone missing for long times, and that those will be necessary resources if we want to start to push the nihilistic core down to size. Eric On Nov 8, 2024, at 0:48, steve smith <sasm...@swcp.com <mailto:sasm...@swcp.com> > wrote: Sarbajit wrote: "> ..,The people who voted for him probably do not read Paxton, Arendt or Levitsky and Ziblat ..." The people who voted for him don't read... We have a similar problem in India, the great semi-literate masses have been handed cheap smartp[hiones with cheap data plans so they are connected 24x7 to the Matrix. Thank you for this pithy bit of parallax, it cuts at least two ways. I believe that we 'elites' make the mistake of wanting the unwashed/semi-literate/??? masses to share our perspectives (whether we be progressive/conservative, liberal/authoritative) and support our vision for *their* future. We then get upset when *they* listen to the *other* elites rather than us. I was completely convinced that Kamala & Co had made such a good argument for *our* vision of a future for humanity (American Exceptional Centric of course) that it would *overwhelmingly* (at least by the margin Trump took over Harris but vice-versa) persuade the folks whose future we are hoping to define. As it turns out, the *other* camp of elites managed to find the right chords to strike, notes to hit to resonate with 74M voters? I'm probably misusing "elite" here (or at least idiosyncratically) to reference those with agency in society above some arbitrary threshold. Education, Social Status, Professional/Trade Status, Ability, Insight, all combine to support this Agency-in-Context, and even more relevant perhaps is the *perception* of Agency? When those who wield economic/political/practical power (the wealthy, the successful politician or rhetoritician, the champion fighter or consummate craftsman) speak, we listen. Trump had Musk and Rogan and Hulk Hogan and the threat/promise of "the STRONG people" (Bikers, LEO, Soldiers, Truckers, Cowboys, ... ) while Harris had all the big name entertainment talent (except Lee Greenwood?) and Academics (except Dennis Prager and 6 other similar wankers) and the Generals ( who the rank and file can be taught or reminded to resent) and the intelligencia. I'm still waiting/hoping/ideating on a better way to achieve collective emergent "wisdom". Glen's references to the tension between "liberal" individuality and any of the extant brands of collectivism (party membership, military marshalling, religious faithing, culting, etc) gestures in a useful direction. Well formed (if not always understood) variations on Swarming (nod to Glen and Marcus) in biology are interesting and maybe the best route in, but I'm still stalled and the smash into a new era of explicit Trumpism is distracting me, even if it somehow forces the parallax I'm missing. 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