Yale Law Students Shout Down Bipartisan Free Speech Talk - And, Oh Yeah, The First Source Was Nearly Exactly Right, According to David Lat and Others (2 Viewers)

[FairWarning]

Merely a flesh wound when you have over 40.0 billion in your endowment fund so the slave trading university can survive. 

Not offensive enough to change the name of the school, only change the name of your school.  

 

[BladeRunner]

No it isn’t, and no it doesn’t. The First Amendment is unaffected by college students protesting. 

Right now, maybe. But in the future when these new Bolsheviks start taking positions of power and running the country you're going to see them do away with that real quick.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

I've "known" people like Matt Yglesias, Conor Friedersdorf, Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and for about 20 years now.  Those folks were all solidly opposed to George W. Bush and could accurately be described as liberals.  I would have put them in the blue tribe until very recently.  They still sort-of are, but these days progressives have moved so far to the left and conservatives have gotten so deranged that I feel like those people have a lot more in common with me and other Reason-style libertarians than they do with their own folks.

A thread by Noah Smith:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1524834004918185984

 

[IvanKaramazov]

A thread by Noah Smith:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1524834004918185984

Saw this earlier.  I feel like I know exactly what he's talking about, only on the other side of the aisle.  

For example, it was around the tail end of the W administration when people started showing up to right-wing rallies with rifles strapped to their back.  I get that they have a second amendment right to do that, but I was still taken aback.  In hindsight, that clearly represented a moment where I first stated to feel like conservative activists were moving sharply away from me.  Now admittedly, strutting around with a long rifle isn't the same thing as wearing a stupid pink hat, but I remember how alienating that was, and it's interesting that Smith experienced something similar a few years later.

 

[fatguyinalittlecoat]

So if we assume the premise is right that both sides of the aisle have lost their minds just in the last few years, what’s the leading theory about why? Social media?

 

[rockaction]

So if we assume the premise is right that both sides of the aisle have lost their minds just in the last few years, what’s the leading theory about why? Social media?

I would venture that our social capital finally ran out. In order for our democratic society to function, we need an element that de Tocqueville and others noticed about us -- a willingness to form associations based on mutual respect and trust, associations that often transcend the political or merely self-serving. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1997 book Trust, details the decline in associations in American life, from church attendance to union participation. He sees the decline in our associative personality as troubling. And add to that the nagging suspicion that we no longer trust our existing institutions that have proven no longer worthy of our trust (see especially the Catholic Church scandal) and you've got a lethal cocktail.

The movement towards individualism, or the "culture of rights" and the propensity to satisfy one's self at all costs didn't help, either. Families deteriorated at the same rate that associations suffered from the '60s onward. So combine a lack of institutional direction, a rampant individualism, only mix that with our ever-communitarian healthy need to invest in something larger than one's self, and you've got radicalized political expression of some form or another. 

And social media didn't really help, but I can't imagine that a healthy society wouldn't be able to withstand it. 

 

[dkp993]

So if we assume the premise is right that both sides of the aisle have lost their minds just in the last few years, what’s the leading theory about why? Social media?

Social Media just accelerated the process. Supercharged it so to speak. Prior too we had this slow burning flame that was steadily growing.  Along comes SM and the algorithms with them and it was like a bucket of rocket fuel was dumped on this small flame.  Woooossshh and everything’s on fire.  

 

[FairWarning]

So if we assume the premise is right that both sides of the aisle have lost their minds just in the last few years, what’s the leading theory about why? Social media?

Yes

 

[RCon]

So if we assume the premise is right that both sides of the aisle have lost their minds just in the last few years, what’s the leading theory about why? Social media?

Social Media just accelerated the process. Supercharged it so to speak. Prior too we had this slow burning flame that was steadily growing.  Along comes SM and the algorithms with them and it was like a bucket of rocket fuel was dumped on this small flame.  Woooossshh and everything’s on fire.

It's more than just that.  There's also the idea that governance and legislation is (was) supposed to be slow, measured, and deliberative rather than instantaneous.  When the rest of the world was also moving slowly, that worked out fine.  Now we have a massive push for instant gratification (via advertisements, via seeing it on TV shows, etc.) and an unprecedented ability to deliver instant gratification (via downloads, overnight delivery, YouTube, etc.) which leads to a populace that is no longer satisfied with slow, measured, and deliberate.  Soundbite politics rule the day via instant gratification.  Soundbite politicians are rewarded instead of punished, so naturally we get more of them.  Gerrymandered districts then add to extremism, which is rewarded in a self-fulfilling way.

There are lots of potential solutions or, at least, ways to mitigate some of the damage, but nearly all of them would need to be implemented by the very people (incumbents) who benefit most from the status quo.  These would include:

* Ranked choice voting (tamps down on extremism by allowing voters to consider third-party candidates without "wasting a vote")
* Proportional representation (tamps down on extremism the same way)
* Increasing representation by shrinking districts and adding legislators (tamps down on soundbite politics by forcing representatives to be more "representative" of a small community rather than massive blobs of people)
* Ending gerrymandering (tamps down on extremism by reducing "safe seats")
* Reducing public/private shuttling of representatives/lobbyists/corporate jobs (tamps down on corporate control of representatives; would almost certainly need to be in concert with shrinking districts to force more community accountability)

 

[FairWarning]

Speaking of outside influences Rich, I would love to see donations from outside influences in state/local elections end also. 

 

[RCon]

Speaking of outside influences Rich, I would love to see donations from outside influences in state/local elections end also. 

Yeah, forgot one on the list of "potential solutions that harm incumbents" above: instant, transparent, public reporting of all political contributions, including PACs and Super PACs.

 

[FairWarning]

Yeah, forgot one on the list of "potential solutions that harm incumbents" above: instant, transparent, public reporting of all political contributions, including PACs and Super PACs.

At a guess, this is why a lot of Trump people are winning.  Yes, people still have to vote,  but outside money is having too big a say in the narrative.  I think it helps answer the question of why don’t people stand up to Trump.

 

[Yankee23Fan]

I would venture that our social capital finally ran out. In order for our democratic society to function, we need an element that de Tocqueville and others noticed about us -- a willingness to form associations based on mutual respect and trust, associations that often transcend the political or merely self-serving. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1997 book Trust, details the decline in associations in American life, from church attendance to union participation. He sees the decline in our associative personality as troubling. And add to that the nagging suspicion that we no longer trust our existing institutions that have proven no longer worthy of our trust (see especially the Catholic Church scandal) and you've got a lethal cocktail.

The movement towards individualism, or the "culture of rights" and the propensity to satisfy one's self at all costs didn't help, either. Families deteriorated at the same rate that associations suffered from the '60s onward. So combine a lack of institutional direction, a rampant individualism, only mix that with our ever-communitarian healthy need to invest in something larger than one's self, and you've got radicalized political expression of some form or another. 

And social media didn't really help, but I can't imagine that a healthy society wouldn't be able to withstand it. 

Good post.

And the church is a big culprit too, and only themselves/ourselves to blame.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

I would venture that our social capital finally ran out. In order for our democratic society to function, we need an element that de Tocqueville and others noticed about us -- a willingness to form associations based on mutual respect and trust, associations that often transcend the political or merely self-serving. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1997 book Trust, details the decline in associations in American life, from church attendance to union participation. He sees the decline in our associative personality as troubling. And add to that the nagging suspicion that we no longer trust our existing institutions that have proven no longer worthy of our trust (see especially the Catholic Church scandal) and you've got a lethal cocktail.

The movement towards individualism, or the "culture of rights" and the propensity to satisfy one's self at all costs didn't help, either. Families deteriorated at the same rate that associations suffered from the '60s onward. So combine a lack of institutional direction, a rampant individualism, only mix that with our ever-communitarian healthy need to invest in something larger than one's self, and you've got radicalized political expression of some form or another. 

And social media didn't really help, but I can't imagine that a healthy society wouldn't be able to withstand it. 

I'm a big "culture of rights" guy and I really like living in a society where I can do my own thing without worrying about the approval or disapproval of others.  I'm also pretty sure that I'm hard-wired to at least moderately distrust authority figures.  I'm not Glenn Greenwald, but I'm happy that people like Glenn Greenwald are around, if that makes any sense.  

All that said, I think you're exactly spot on here.  

We don't really have a shared culture any more.  As you note, we don't belong to common organization like churches, unions, bowling leagues, the Elks Club, or whatever.  We don't get our news from common sources like Walter Cronkite or Bernard Shaw.  We don't see the same movies or watch the same shows.

I got my first real job when I was 26, and I'll retire from my that organization in half a dozen or so years.  I think I'm a massive outlier in that dimension.  Nobody stays with a single employer that long.  Employment is completely mercenary on both ends.  

And why would any rational person have any trust in any institutions these days?  We already had excellent reasons for distrusting "the government" (meaning all the elected leaders that we can name, along with their staffs and subordinates).  The legacy media has been operating in a full-on sprint to discredit itself the past few years.  We just saw what public health officials are capable of doing if you give them a little power.  Anybody feeling confident about your HR department?

I need to add here that in many respects, I really like all this.  I feel like I have more ability to chart my own course through the last few decades of my life than I've ever had, or ever had any reason to expect.  I like not being constrained to lowest-common-denominator television programming, like the ####ty family sitcoms we all had to put up with in the 80s and 90s.  I like knowing that I'm right not to trust institutions, and I have more ability to ignore them than ever.  The way we've restructured society actually works pretty well for me personally.

But it should be obvious to everyone that this sort of atomization doesn't work well for most people.  It's not working well for the United States at the moment.  Social media probably accelerated all of this, and it certainly makes it more visible, but I don't know that it's really the causal factor here.  Or, if it is, it's just one causal factor among several.  This would still be happening, albeit more slowly and on the down-low, without Facebook or Twitter.