Cultural evolution may be moving along as lazily as always, but memetic evolution gets faster and faster. Clickbait news sites increase the intensity of selection to tropical-rainforest-like levels. What survives turns out to be conspiracy-laden nationalism and conspiracy-laden socialism. The rise of Trump was really bad, and I don’t think it could have happened just ten or twenty years ago. Some sort of culturally-evolved immune system (“basic decency”) would have prevented it. Now the power of convincing-sounding ideas to spread through and energize the populace has overwhelmed what that kind of immunity can deal with.
Think of gender roles. For many generations, they evolved very slowly. The pace of change in the twentieth century, which seemed rapid at the time, seems glacial by today’s standards. Back then, women steadily increased their participation in the work force. Over a period of decades, sexual taboos came to be relaxed, notably concerning divorce and pre-marital sex. Next came gay liberation, which took place roughly from 1970 to 2000.
But in the last five years, the memetic evolution has sped up enormously. It seems like we’ve had a new cool gender-identity flavor every month, and even “ordinary” gays are feeling as threatened as old-fashioned straights.
We have no idea whether these trendy gender fluidity memes represent progress. I certainly have my doubts. But it feels to me as if our culture is a passenger in a car with no brakes.
I agree that a Trump presidency would not have been possible a dozen years ago. To the Claremont folks, his victory is our way of trying to stop the runaway car. But I think it is more plausibly explained by Martin Gurri’s idea of the revolt of the public, made possible by the new media environment. The car is still going ahead full speed, just without the support of the Secretary of Education–for now.
Until very recently, the party elites and the mainstream media were powerful enough to prevent an outsider rebel like Mr. Trump from gaining a major party nomination, if they wanted to do so. Goldwater and McGovern made it past the party establishments, but each of them claimed to be aligned with the establishment in a more pure form, which made the establishment unwilling to wholeheartedly resist. Another reason that the establishment put up weak resistance to their insurgencies was that in both cases they expected to lose the general election, anyway.
Mr. Trump’s approach to politics is more personal than ideological. The establishment resistance to him was more highly motivated than the establishment resistance to Goldwater or McGovern, but it was utterly ineffectual.
“Until very recently, the party elites and the mainstream media were powerful enough to prevent an outsider rebel like Mr. Trump from gaining a major party nomination, if they wanted to do so.”
I don’t think we know whether this is true or not. The very few outsider attempts at power in the last 60 years (Perot and maybe Wallace/Buchanan) just didn’t have anything close to the bizarro charisma that Trump has.
To me, Trump has exposed just how weak party elites and the mainstream media are, not that it has fallen apart in the last decade.
Go back and look at the last 50 years, and we see most of the same elements in place. It has always been there, just on a smaller scale. Every President, except perhaps Carter, has done some sketchy stuff. Trump just came in and decided careful, situational manipulation tactics were too timid. He went full time. What we found out is that the only thing that held everything together was shame.
You could argue that Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings or George Mitchell could have swayed that angry third of the country to barf out Trump. I’m not so sure they would have been able to, and I’m not sure Trump requires the internet to succeed. Maybe.
In Arnold’s comments are references to “establishment” and “establishments.” Part of what Gurri points out are changes in the factors that form and maintain the various oligarchies of which they are composed.
In effect (and more recently on his Fifth Wave) Gurri has noted the dissolution of “authority” (his word choice) and need for its restoration; but, without sufficient illumination of a (or the) source (usually “public” accedence in Open Societies).
One view : The “establishments” are now – gone. The members who once formed them now are “cliques” whose academic or other credentalism are less and less accepted at “face value” (even within their own ranks).
How likely is it that new “establishments” will be formed and have an effective role?
I think we are spending far too much time and energy looking at why many of us voted FOR Trump and not looking at why we lost faith in the other runaway car named Clinton. Many of us believed that runaway car was more dangerous than Trump, if for no other reason that she was more effective and had the support of her “mechanics”.
Notice the other political change? When was the last time we had a serious candidate from California? The other thing, Texas has had its run at the presidency and few of us wanted that scenario again. It was simply New York’s turn at the wheel and we had a referendum on New York politics, and we didn’t like it.
Since memes are cultural units, memetic evolution just is cultural evolution. What Alexander is talking about is the distinction between what he calls “legible” (i.e., explicit or conscious) memes and “illegible” (i.e., implicit or unconscious) cultural elements. Since there’s nothing new about that, our culture has always been “a passenger in a car with no brakes”, even if we thought “we” — who- or whatever we think that “we” might be — were drivers in control. The speed may increase or decrease at various times, due again to factors largely out of our deliberate control, but the ultimate driver is the one behind any sort of evolution — the natural selection of what works. It’s the Darwinian Comedy.
Scott Alexander has the chutzpah to talk of “basic decency.”
-Like the megalomaniacal messianic demagoguery of “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
-Like Hillary’s “We came, we saw, he died” braggadocio upon successfully plunging Libya into a state of anarchy from which it has yet to recover.
-Like Biden’s speechifying about how the Republicans “will have you back in chains?”
-Like how it is a commonplace to compare each and every Republican presidential candidate to Hitler? Romney, McCain, Bush….none were exempt.
-Like the glib and casual bigotry of ascribing racism and sexism to one’s political opponents with the flimsiest of evidence and often twisting and misreporting actual words to create a stir?
-Like Obama’s bigoted pronouncement against small town Americans: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
-Liking using the IRS to thwart political opposition? The IRS this year has been issuing settlement checks to 100 right-of-center groups wrongfully targeted for their political beliefs under the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service.
-Like channeling $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in the Sec. 1705 Loan Guarantee Program loans granted as of Sept. 15, 2011 to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers, individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. A March 2011 GAO report examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented.
-Like having a campaign web site owned by a company based in China. “Robert W. Roche, the co-founder and chairman of the board of Acorn International Inc., a media and branding direct-sales company based in Shanghai. He also owns the Obama.com website, which appears on the Internet throughout the world. Roche’s site links to Barackobama.com, the official campaign site, where it invites people to donate to the campaign. Obama.com gets 2,000 visits a day, two-thirds of which are from foreigners.” As Dick Morris wrote in The Hill in an article entitled “Obama’s foreign donors” on 10/09/12.
-Like the orgy of graft necessary to get the PPACA enacted without a single Republican vote, a law that made the purchase of certain types of health care compulsory on threat of penalty? Including not a word to limit pharma price increases while interfering across the board in the rest of the healthcare industry?
-Like penalizing colleges that afforded due protection to accused male students?
-Like ordering the assassination of US citizens on foreign soil from the Oval Office without due process?
– Like political spying on then Rep. Dennis Kucinich and on investigative journalists?
– Like Operation Echo Chamber and targeting journalists with secret FISA court orders?
And this barely scratches the list of indecent, indeed vile behavior, that characterizes the establishment.
It is tempting to think that the bitterness of the contempt for Trump stems from a sense of guilt, but it is doubtful that the establishment, its enablers, and its apologists are capable of that, much less basic self-awareness.
Trump may not be superior to his detractors in every regard, but on balance most. And even if you don’t agree with Trump’s superiority, that does not erase the fact that the elites are vile, reactionary, corrupt, and worthless.
Trump is the brakes.
No new wars, no secret spying on political opponents, no foreign campaign contributions, no midnight pallets of cash to mullahs, no buying world popularity with billions in Paris Climate Accord give aways, regulation promulgation ramped back, no abject submission to a global Chinese industrial policy, no submission to new international bureaucracies like the TPP would have created. But of course on the other hand there is the record low unemployment rates reducing college enrollments, so he is not perfect.
But I rant.
There is an entire literature out there on the rottenness of the establishment. Dozens and dozens of books. With full apologies for any detraction by association, probably the best place to start in putting the US political situation in perspective is “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law” by David Bernstein and Ted Cruz.
Come up with a candidate who can do a better job of upsetting the cart of rotten apples than Trump, and they will have my full support.
Whew. Lol…
“Like Obama’s bigoted pronouncement against small town Americans: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Are you saying that this is not the case with a lot of small towns across America? I don’t see how that is a bigoted statement when there are millions of people living in rural areas with beliefs like that.
For one, it assumes that they’re beliefs on these issues are wrong. Obama thinks they are wrong, but Obama could be wrong himself. He doesn’t think they are independent individuals who came to reasonable conclusions based on their view of the evidence. Rather, he states they believe what they believe out of bitterness and emotionalism. Thus their beliefs can be dismissed rather than examined.
I mean, this was the point of that statement. To offer an explanation for others beliefs by offering a psychological explanation for their “irrationality” rather than conserving the reason behind their beliefs.
There are plenty of historical parallels of incredibly rapid ideological-political shifts and ‘memetic evolution’. All of which had the feeling of riding in a car with no breaks / the wheels coming off / living in a National Nervous Breakdown / accelerating into a singularity / having no idea what new innovations or escalations tomorrow will bring, or what fresh hells cult-like zealot fanatics will invent to surpass each other in displays of true commitment and to enforce the latest party line in a frantic rat race of competitive sanctimony.
Examples include the French and Russian Revolutions, and actually most Communist revolutions, especially the Chinese. Arguably the schismatic (or ‘sequentially heretical’) phases of the Protestant Reformation at well. Social media was not the important factor in these instances.
My view is that it’s best to understand these instances as being a fundamental tendency and vulnerability of any human society that I call a Social Failure Mode. Every coastal or riparian settlement is prone to flooding due ot major storms in the nature of things, and will predictably flood without dams or levees or similar works. The same thing happens with politics and ideology. A fundamental ideological principle will rapidly be taken to increasing extremes without a series of “conservative dams” in its way to oppose the trend.
If a society is organized such that there is One Big Dam (which, notice, was true in the above instances of states and national-scale institutions which had become highly centralized), then the failure of that dam really means a true deluge with no nearby natural (i.e. Schelling / focal) stopping point, acting like an ideological local minimum to hold things in place for a while.
America has had a mostly lucky history in which a combination of decentralized centers of influence, the Anglo Saxon cultural inheritance, and the intentional construction and granting of tremendous power to multiple naturally conservative (perhaps ‘inertial’ is a more neutral term) governing institutions (such as the courts and the bureaucracy) has kept such really severe Social Failure Mode incidents to a minimum.
But you can’t put the termites in charge of all the shoring timbers and expect your ship to hold together. The American context has changed (and become much more centralized), and it was inevitable that the left would eventually discover ways to route around these defenses like the Germans going around the Maginot Line through the Ardennes. Just like France and the Low Countries collapsed within mere weeks once the major defense was rendered inoperative, whole regions of stable ideological space can be wiped away in short order when oppositional principles become moot.
“Fighting the last war” is the idiom we use to describe such situations, when those generals responsible for defense are too inertial in their analysis and practice.
But this is what has happened to the GOP and whatever is left of the old American Conservative Movement that still holds out hope for a return to the pre-Trump respectable and procedural ways of pursuing their goals. They are fighting the last war, but they can’t do it that way anymore, because the old Maginot Lines no longer work against the new enemies with their new capabilities and tactics.
It wasn’t all progress, i.e. changes in the same direction. There were periods of liberalization and de-liberalization. As an example, my grandmother was born in the early 1890s and had a more ‘modern’ life (college, job, atheism, late marriage) than many would think possible if they relied on the popular image of the 1950s and drew a straight line from now to 1950 and then into the past. It’s my impression that WWI and the 1920’s shook things up, while the Depression and the post-WWII period pushed back.
And I say “popular image” because if you didn’t live through a particular time, you probably have a fictionalized and politicized view of that time. I remember the 1970s as an adult and much of what I see written about that time is just not true .
Indeed, I think some might say that the Internet has enabled Satan’s invisible world laid bare, where in the past folks might have been ignorant, willfully or otherwise.
Until very recently, the party elites and the mainstream media were powerful enough to prevent an outsider rebel like Mr. Trump from gaining a major party nomination
Or it was not popular enough. Trump’s run was not completely new as Ross Perot won 19%+ of the vote in 1992 which was the weirdest post-WW2 Presidential election until 2016. And the paloconservative views are not new and growing in popularity with Buchanan and softly with Douthat and Brooks. Also, we can not underestimate the slow comeback and size of the Great Recession in 2008 which long term hit the WWC the most.
Again, most pundits are missing Trump ran on:
1) No Social Security cuts. He was considered more centrist than HRC in 2016.
2) Trade deals to increase Manufacturing jobs at steel plants and car factories.
So there was plenty of taunting SJWs by Trump, but he ran for the return of 1960 economy which gave him an electoral college victory.