[HN Gopher] Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public
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Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public
Author : deepbow
Score : 19 points
Date : 2020-11-05 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thepullrequest.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thepullrequest.com)
| kickout wrote:
| Long read (already read it previously), but very good.
|
| Should be more fodder for breaking up and beefing up regulations
| on tech companies
| wahern wrote:
| In the interview Martin Gurri characterizes the left thusly:
|
| > Today the big issue is... what? Wearing MAGA hats? Racism
| certainly isn't a divisive issue. Everybody's against it.
| Capitalism isn't much of an issue. Nobody even talks about
| class or poverty any more. Identity's too diffuse and dispersed
| - if identitarians started fighting, it would look more like a
| scrum than a civil war.
|
| That's not honest. It would be like saying that Reagan
| supporters in the 1980s only cared about welfare queens,
| without any substantive policy preferences regarding industrial
| regulation, unions, defense, etc. In reality "welfare queens"
| was short-hand for _all_ the substantive policy preferences
| demanded by conservatives, as well as a statement about the
| perceived consequences of the excesses of liberal policies.
| Similar, MAGA hat derision is a liberal statement about the
| irony of promoting conservative, free market, anti-social
| safety net policies to "Make America Great Again" when from
| the left's perspective all the agreed upon societal ills--e.g.
| loss of blue collar jobs to free trade, lack of income growth
| combined with increasing income disparity, corporate
| oligopolies, etc--are a consequence of conservative,
| _Republican_ , policies. The GOP was the architect of both
| NAFTA and China entering GATT/WTO.[1] The "neoliberal" movement
| in the Democratic party was a _conservative_ movement; it was
| an adoption by some Democrats of _conservative_ _Republican_
| economic policies in an attempt to win over increasingly
| Republican-leaning voters who had been successfully persuaded
| that traditionally Democratic economic policies (i.e.
| antagonism to free trade, pro union, etc) were hostile to job
| growth. And just as Democrats were scrambling to realign their
| economic platforms with the rightward shift in the electorate,
| so too was Labor doing exactly the same thing in the U.K.
| Thatcher and Reagan ushered in the preeminence of conservative
| economic policies, and Blair and Clinton were responses to
| that. To then blame Democrats and their "neoliberal" policies
| for the legacy of conservative (classically "liberal" outside
| the Anglosphere--note the semantic games) economic policies
| is... rich.
|
| I'm sorry, but either Martin Gurri is less than 25 years old,
| or he's willfully misrepresenting actual, factual, not-
| particularly-distant political history. I'm pretty sure it's
| the latter, and he's simply using obtuse, scholarly-sounding
| terminology to sell a constructed narrative popular among far
| too many conservatives. I'm familiar with the tactic having
| heard plenty of similar B.S. political fantasies (e.g. Marxist,
| Fascist, etc, arguments) that build plausible seeming
| narratives around hidden, false premises.
|
| There's plenty of blame to go around regarding contemporary
| cultural divisions. The conservatives were right in their
| criticisms of the left's identity politics and victim culture.
| Indeed, identity politics has swallowed up everybody, and it
| turns out the empowered and entitled often make for the most
| sympathetic victims of all. But let's be clear about who
| promoted what, when, and why before we start naming our
| oppressors and nominating our saviors.
|
| [1] When NAFTA passed under a Clinton presidency, 2/3 of House
| Republicans voted for it (including Newt Gingrich, who
| successfully helped to push through special "fast-track" voting
| rules), while only 1/3 of Democrats voted for it. President
| Clinton, like Tony Blair in the U.K., was seen as successful
| precisely because of his _conservative_ economic policies.
| Clinton also supported GOP authored welfare reform, including
| block grants to states (which Democrats feared would be
| directed away from the working class), despite fierce
| opposition from his own party.
| gipp wrote:
| That's a curious reading of the post.
|
| I think he would say that the ongoing fallout is caused by
| structural changes in communication networks, and that the
| players who happen to be at the top of the pile economically
| are incidental to that process.
| nickff wrote:
| I think you're misreading Gurri; according to his reasoning,
| any measure is almost impossible (including regulation or anti-
| trust). From the post:
|
| >"Liberal democracy is still the only game in town. You can't
| compete with it - but you can destroy it. You can smash it to
| bits and put nothing in its place. You can bring down an
| avenging chaos on a corrupt world. So when you ask whether
| today's protests will ever lead to anything, the answer is
| probably not. They have little positive content."
|
| If we use his paradigm to analyze the 'tech situation', the
| most likely outcome is furious protests, with no ability to
| cohere around any specific action.
| creddit wrote:
| I always recommend Martin Gurri for people looking to model the
| present state of the US and, in particular, new
| media/communications platforms impacts.
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