Andrew Sullivan is another one. Wonder what he thinks about his guy DeSantis now. He has started banging the drum about the Trump threat, but he sure did his part to enable Trump and the GOP in the Biden years with his anti-woke hysteria.
Yeah that one's a real shame. Back in the blog days, Sullivan's platform and audience was one of the most wide open, smart, thoughtful places I spent online time in. He was very smart, and had strong opinions, but readers would chime in and disagree, speaking from personal experience, and the discussions were really informative, funny and smart. And people (including Andrew) acknowledged each other's insights and their own shifts in understanding. The new woke-obsessed ranting version was such a terrible disappointment!
One of the reasons I’m so upset with Sullivan is that I was a big Dish fan back in the day. I think he began to lose it around the time of the Kavanaugh confirmation, but it was his dismissive response to the overturning of Roe that led me to cancel my subscription. FAFO, I’m afraid. To paraphrase, “First they came for the women…”
Literally all he talked about for 4 years were how non white immigrants and trans people were bad. Now a brief has been filed to the Supreme Court by Republican to overturn Obergefell. I have never seen a better example of voting against your own interest in my life.
The Free Press was very silly about economics. Clueless Tyler Cowen. Like a Republican tea party level of analysis: the socialists are coming …! Uh, no, they are not. They prefer Scandinavia, thank you very much.
Brock's thinking is incisive. The problem, dear "Brutus," is that when you are on a ship, big or small, you get nowhere peeing off the bow into a headwind. The audience (i.e., the citizenry, electorate) has directed their lives towards "economy" (i.e., greed, self-aggrandizement, self-interest). What we have too much of in the US is not LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) but far too much AIL (apathy, indifference to cause, lack of unity). When you combine a lack of LUV with a profusion of AIL, you have the perfect recipe (storm) for disaster.
Yes, wokeism is for many, including me, intrusive and often obnoxious. But as Brock has repeatedly written, we cannot or should not equate the "cons" of Democracy with the lethal pathology of authoritarianism. What we have in the US is growing Fascism. It is not that we are approaching Fascism, but that it has arrived, and we opened our doors to it. It is here for anyone with a few functioning neurons.
The problem is that America has become a stupid nation, one that has grown fat and lazy and obsessed with getting and spending. A country that can elect a con man, a wheeler-dealer, a being open to raping the environment (drill baby drill), and flagrantly enriching himself and his family (violating the Emolument Clause of the US Constitution). It is a pathetic and pathological nation. I do not think it is worth the effort to comment on those who equate Democratic Party wrongs with GOP wrongs. "Well, Biden was corrupt too." That's just such idiocy. And when I speak over breakfast with some "successful" person and they aver that the 2020 national election was stolen, I have to conclude that what we have is not a problem in communication, but a disaster in clear thinking and a failure to check facts. The image that Brock selected tells it all:
"A nation of sheep will soon have a government of wolves." That is actually wrong; our nation has a government of wolves, and they will devour all that has been good about Democracy both at home and in the world. We are seeing our President, trump democracy with fascism. We are witnessing Ukraine tossed to the ravenous, insatiable Putin; we are seeing one violation after another of the US Constitution, and guess what: the band played on.
The Nation, the "patient" is in dire straits. The Nation is a code Red, literally and figuratively. We are now a Nation that is a Russian asset. This is WWIII, and it is not "Operation Market Garden" as in WWII, but "DOGE" or Destroy our Great Experiment.
A real friend tells you if you have parsley stuck to your front teeth or if you have bad breath. I am telling you, citizens of America, that your mental lassitude, your apathy, your attention deficit "syndrome" has led to the shit-storm we currently face. My life is just about spent. I will turn 83 in another two weeks, but my children, and yours, have been left a most horrible legacy. You have made your bed; now see how well your children and grandchildren sleep.
Another great essay. It seems very difficult for normal people to understand that people who are emotionally stunted can be "smart" and wrong at the same time. People with childhood emotional handicaps do not have self-confidence; they turn their intelligence to conniving and bullying. Their identity is constructed, not natural. They are at least slightly paranoid because they are not achievers in the normal sense -- they are compensating. They are incapable of seeing things straight on, because their emotional deprivation requires a bulwark of self-oriented (narcissistic) fantasy. We have a problem borne of accepting these people at face value, when a depth assessment is -- as shown in this essay -- that they are not emotionally equipped to be part of normal society, able to get along and cooperate with people of different backgrounds. They have attached themselves to a predatory culture of sociopaths and psychopaths who turn every advantage into permanent gain, knowing no limits as normal people do, and no real satisfaction other than predatory success. The rest of us have to stay awake in our own defense, or wake up to the now-existential threat. Paranoia leads ultimately to fascism -- the ultimate bullying of normal people they fear for being normal and successful, happy people.
Yeah. Rogan gave people permission to focus on the one issue where they agreed with conservatives (in his case, primarily, as I recall, COVID-related restrictions) and make it more important than every issue where they agreed with progressives.
Even before his opinions solidified on numerous issues, he would still do stuff like make a claim and only then ask his producer to fact-check him, which would take a little while, which in the podcast format meant that you would get people switching off in between the claim and the fact check and thus never hearing that Rogan was, in fact, wrong.
I too find leftist excesses annoying. But it's possible to ignore annoyances. No one is forcing me to declare my pronouns. No one is criminalizing my inadvertent microaggressions. No masked thugs are likely to stomp on my head for failing to salute a rainbow flag.
But the excesses of the right have blasted through every red line. Masked thugs ARE stomping on heads for appearing Hispanic or standing with those who do. The regime IS criminalizing criticism of their policies (under pretexts, of course). Private companies ARE being forced to REMOVE their DEI training programs and agree to provide free services to Trump.
I think the response from some on the right to this would be that there were people losing their livelihoods over opposition to progressive cultural policies; see, for instance, Brendan Eich being pressed to resign as CEO of Mozilla over his opposition to same-sex marriage, or Gina Carano losing her role as Cara Dune on "The Mandalorian" (and the character being written out) for her statements on assorted social issues. I'm sure I could find more examples if I wanted to look; these are just the two that came to mind immediately.
The answer to this, of course, is that losing your livelihood is a far lesser punishment than losing your liberty. We recognise this in law. A trial to determine whether a doctor should be stripped of her licence to practise medicine because of malpractice is treated as a civil matter, and subject to civil standards of proof. (This varies between jurisdictions; the US uses the "clear and convincing evidence" standard, reserving the "preponderance of the evidence" standard for money damages, while Canada uses the "proof on a balance of probabilities" standard for all civil matters.) But a trial to determine whether a person should be incarcerated, or be subject to other criminal penalties, requires proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", a much taller order. (Remember, OJ Simpson was acquitted at a criminal trial, because of police errors and an excellent defense lawyer, but at his subsequent civil trial he lost and it wasn't even close.) Neither Eich nor Carano has been incarcerated; indeed Eich subsequently founded and is the CEO of Brave Software, while Carano subsequently appeared in "Terror on the Prairie" and "My Son Hunter", and recently settled a pending lawsuit against Disney over her firing. Meanwhile US citizens have been arrested, detained and deported by the current administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_and_deportation_of_American_citizens_in_the_second_Trump_administration
EDIT: I should add that I've seen a disturbing trend among the public at large to cry for conviction in criminal cases while urging caution in civil cases, despite our legal system(s) demanding the reverse. (From my own country, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and acquittal resulted in reforms that made it harder for sexual assault defendants to mount a full defense, and the recent Hockey Canada acquittal is likely to do the same; meanwhile in the United States, which has a similar English-derived legal system, there were many calls for caution with Trump v. Anderson despite the repeated holdings on the merits that Trump had participated in insurrection and the penalty, loss of passive suffrage, arguably not even being as severe as loss of money.) I think this is because the average person, not too familiar with how the legal system works, simply cannot picture herself as being in a position where she would be a criminal defendant, and thus is quick to pass judgment in such matters. Meanwhile, it is much easier for her to see herself being the respondent in a civil case, leading her to be much more critical of the claims made there.
Thanks for the detailed response! I agree that people losing jobs for opposing left-extremist norms is not a good thing, but those decisions come from private firms that typically have discretion as long as the decisions are not based on race, religion, or national origin. As long as it's based on behavior, it's allowable although there is certainly a gray area where behavior can be inferred from ideology, which comes dangerously close to religion.
But still the actions of the Trump regime don't recognize such niceties. Their decisions are those of government, not private companies, and go much further by being clearly corrupt in many cases. They make no secret of the intent to win by a combination of delay and impoverishment, regardless of the ultimate decisions of courts.
It’s interesting that the actual dangers of wokeism are something they almost never articulate. As in, exactly who does it hurt and how? They answer this with abstractions (the victim of wokeism is “western civilization”). When pressed to identify tangible harms, they will make something up about forced gender-reassignment surgeries on kids. When you really press them to point to something supported by evidence, they will mention a journalist who was fired.
Good summary Mike. If only folks were more aware of the consequences of their cognitive biases. One could hear the echo of Tversky and Kahneman in your writing. Well done. Keep up the good work.
I don't understand how the educated Liberal middle thinks they can just chill while all of this continues to grow. From their perspective, their is a rising demagogue on their right and an increasingly deranged mob on their left, both saying they refuse to allow the status quo to continue, and instead of trying to negotiate a workable solution they just sip their tea, repeat "End of History" a few times, and then start pondering how to profit off the suffering until everyone gets bored and settles down. Innocent bystanders don't do well during periods of sectarian violence in which warring groups see their opponents as so immoral they're evil.
While I generally agree with your analysis Mike I think you omitted one other latent variable, Israel.
Bari Weiss, whatever she claims to be, is someone who got her start attacking Columbia faculty for being insufficiently pro-Israel. She made a big point of these attacks and her role in them did, I think, help elevate her to the Times. Ironically Greenwald, of all people, called her out for persecuting Arabs under the guise of free speech.
She was an ardent proponent of Cancel Culture before it became cooler to be against it, and the one thread that connects both her attacks and her complaints is Israel. I think this is in line with your point about Taibbi and Greenwald and their obsessions blinding them to the risks. This is also consistent with what triggered some other anti-cancel-culture types. She was triggered by criticism of Israel while Taibbi was triggered by accusations of sexism.
The algorithms don't reward proportional thinking. They reward single subject repetition. To be proportional in your posts, is to slowly disappear. If a writer does nothing more than write more of what gains traction, they will evolve their writing, possibly unconsciously toward a single subject. I'm not excusing their behavior, but showing how a busy person can be shaped by the platforms.
This is an excellent essay. The problem is not the greed of opportunists (though they are part of the problem). The problem is that self-government is difficult and messy, because humanity is difficult and messy. Authoritarian government is easy and neat. It has been the dominant form of government for most of human history. Prehistory was egalitarian by default. But as soon as we congregated, hierarchical structures developed. Sometimes it was good to have everyone pulling in one direction. Progress happened under authoritarian government. BUT, much like the scientific method, democracy has caused more human progress in a shorter period of time than any authoritarian government. Trial and error in the marketplace of ideas created our modern world. We are victims of our own success. Much like the ignorance of refusing vaccination because you've never seen a child die of polio or diphtheria, choosing autocrats because you find gay pride or Black history or anything different than you annoying or scary leads you to lose your freedom. You've never been at risk of losing your freedom, so you don't think it'll happen to you. But it will. "First they came for the Jews..." People like Greenwald, et al are just as blind as their readers to this.
Andrew Sullivan is another one. Wonder what he thinks about his guy DeSantis now. He has started banging the drum about the Trump threat, but he sure did his part to enable Trump and the GOP in the Biden years with his anti-woke hysteria.
Yeah that one's a real shame. Back in the blog days, Sullivan's platform and audience was one of the most wide open, smart, thoughtful places I spent online time in. He was very smart, and had strong opinions, but readers would chime in and disagree, speaking from personal experience, and the discussions were really informative, funny and smart. And people (including Andrew) acknowledged each other's insights and their own shifts in understanding. The new woke-obsessed ranting version was such a terrible disappointment!
One of the reasons I’m so upset with Sullivan is that I was a big Dish fan back in the day. I think he began to lose it around the time of the Kavanaugh confirmation, but it was his dismissive response to the overturning of Roe that led me to cancel my subscription. FAFO, I’m afraid. To paraphrase, “First they came for the women…”
He likes lowered taxes and figured gays are in enough with the republicans—
Literally all he talked about for 4 years were how non white immigrants and trans people were bad. Now a brief has been filed to the Supreme Court by Republican to overturn Obergefell. I have never seen a better example of voting against your own interest in my life.
This is all why I had to unsubscribe from these contrarian spaces and pods. I think we can safely say now that the mask is all the way off!
The Free Press was very silly about economics. Clueless Tyler Cowen. Like a Republican tea party level of analysis: the socialists are coming …! Uh, no, they are not. They prefer Scandinavia, thank you very much.
Brock's thinking is incisive. The problem, dear "Brutus," is that when you are on a ship, big or small, you get nowhere peeing off the bow into a headwind. The audience (i.e., the citizenry, electorate) has directed their lives towards "economy" (i.e., greed, self-aggrandizement, self-interest). What we have too much of in the US is not LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) but far too much AIL (apathy, indifference to cause, lack of unity). When you combine a lack of LUV with a profusion of AIL, you have the perfect recipe (storm) for disaster.
Yes, wokeism is for many, including me, intrusive and often obnoxious. But as Brock has repeatedly written, we cannot or should not equate the "cons" of Democracy with the lethal pathology of authoritarianism. What we have in the US is growing Fascism. It is not that we are approaching Fascism, but that it has arrived, and we opened our doors to it. It is here for anyone with a few functioning neurons.
The problem is that America has become a stupid nation, one that has grown fat and lazy and obsessed with getting and spending. A country that can elect a con man, a wheeler-dealer, a being open to raping the environment (drill baby drill), and flagrantly enriching himself and his family (violating the Emolument Clause of the US Constitution). It is a pathetic and pathological nation. I do not think it is worth the effort to comment on those who equate Democratic Party wrongs with GOP wrongs. "Well, Biden was corrupt too." That's just such idiocy. And when I speak over breakfast with some "successful" person and they aver that the 2020 national election was stolen, I have to conclude that what we have is not a problem in communication, but a disaster in clear thinking and a failure to check facts. The image that Brock selected tells it all:
"A nation of sheep will soon have a government of wolves." That is actually wrong; our nation has a government of wolves, and they will devour all that has been good about Democracy both at home and in the world. We are seeing our President, trump democracy with fascism. We are witnessing Ukraine tossed to the ravenous, insatiable Putin; we are seeing one violation after another of the US Constitution, and guess what: the band played on.
The Nation, the "patient" is in dire straits. The Nation is a code Red, literally and figuratively. We are now a Nation that is a Russian asset. This is WWIII, and it is not "Operation Market Garden" as in WWII, but "DOGE" or Destroy our Great Experiment.
A real friend tells you if you have parsley stuck to your front teeth or if you have bad breath. I am telling you, citizens of America, that your mental lassitude, your apathy, your attention deficit "syndrome" has led to the shit-storm we currently face. My life is just about spent. I will turn 83 in another two weeks, but my children, and yours, have been left a most horrible legacy. You have made your bed; now see how well your children and grandchildren sleep.
Another great essay. It seems very difficult for normal people to understand that people who are emotionally stunted can be "smart" and wrong at the same time. People with childhood emotional handicaps do not have self-confidence; they turn their intelligence to conniving and bullying. Their identity is constructed, not natural. They are at least slightly paranoid because they are not achievers in the normal sense -- they are compensating. They are incapable of seeing things straight on, because their emotional deprivation requires a bulwark of self-oriented (narcissistic) fantasy. We have a problem borne of accepting these people at face value, when a depth assessment is -- as shown in this essay -- that they are not emotionally equipped to be part of normal society, able to get along and cooperate with people of different backgrounds. They have attached themselves to a predatory culture of sociopaths and psychopaths who turn every advantage into permanent gain, knowing no limits as normal people do, and no real satisfaction other than predatory success. The rest of us have to stay awake in our own defense, or wake up to the now-existential threat. Paranoia leads ultimately to fascism -- the ultimate bullying of normal people they fear for being normal and successful, happy people.
Two words: Joe Rogan.
He’s the godfather of this and should have been included in Mike’s essay as example number 1.
Yeah. Rogan gave people permission to focus on the one issue where they agreed with conservatives (in his case, primarily, as I recall, COVID-related restrictions) and make it more important than every issue where they agreed with progressives.
Even before his opinions solidified on numerous issues, he would still do stuff like make a claim and only then ask his producer to fact-check him, which would take a little while, which in the podcast format meant that you would get people switching off in between the claim and the fact check and thus never hearing that Rogan was, in fact, wrong.
Here's a profound difference in outlook.
I too find leftist excesses annoying. But it's possible to ignore annoyances. No one is forcing me to declare my pronouns. No one is criminalizing my inadvertent microaggressions. No masked thugs are likely to stomp on my head for failing to salute a rainbow flag.
But the excesses of the right have blasted through every red line. Masked thugs ARE stomping on heads for appearing Hispanic or standing with those who do. The regime IS criminalizing criticism of their policies (under pretexts, of course). Private companies ARE being forced to REMOVE their DEI training programs and agree to provide free services to Trump.
I think the response from some on the right to this would be that there were people losing their livelihoods over opposition to progressive cultural policies; see, for instance, Brendan Eich being pressed to resign as CEO of Mozilla over his opposition to same-sex marriage, or Gina Carano losing her role as Cara Dune on "The Mandalorian" (and the character being written out) for her statements on assorted social issues. I'm sure I could find more examples if I wanted to look; these are just the two that came to mind immediately.
The answer to this, of course, is that losing your livelihood is a far lesser punishment than losing your liberty. We recognise this in law. A trial to determine whether a doctor should be stripped of her licence to practise medicine because of malpractice is treated as a civil matter, and subject to civil standards of proof. (This varies between jurisdictions; the US uses the "clear and convincing evidence" standard, reserving the "preponderance of the evidence" standard for money damages, while Canada uses the "proof on a balance of probabilities" standard for all civil matters.) But a trial to determine whether a person should be incarcerated, or be subject to other criminal penalties, requires proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", a much taller order. (Remember, OJ Simpson was acquitted at a criminal trial, because of police errors and an excellent defense lawyer, but at his subsequent civil trial he lost and it wasn't even close.) Neither Eich nor Carano has been incarcerated; indeed Eich subsequently founded and is the CEO of Brave Software, while Carano subsequently appeared in "Terror on the Prairie" and "My Son Hunter", and recently settled a pending lawsuit against Disney over her firing. Meanwhile US citizens have been arrested, detained and deported by the current administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_and_deportation_of_American_citizens_in_the_second_Trump_administration
EDIT: I should add that I've seen a disturbing trend among the public at large to cry for conviction in criminal cases while urging caution in civil cases, despite our legal system(s) demanding the reverse. (From my own country, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and acquittal resulted in reforms that made it harder for sexual assault defendants to mount a full defense, and the recent Hockey Canada acquittal is likely to do the same; meanwhile in the United States, which has a similar English-derived legal system, there were many calls for caution with Trump v. Anderson despite the repeated holdings on the merits that Trump had participated in insurrection and the penalty, loss of passive suffrage, arguably not even being as severe as loss of money.) I think this is because the average person, not too familiar with how the legal system works, simply cannot picture herself as being in a position where she would be a criminal defendant, and thus is quick to pass judgment in such matters. Meanwhile, it is much easier for her to see herself being the respondent in a civil case, leading her to be much more critical of the claims made there.
Thanks for the detailed response! I agree that people losing jobs for opposing left-extremist norms is not a good thing, but those decisions come from private firms that typically have discretion as long as the decisions are not based on race, religion, or national origin. As long as it's based on behavior, it's allowable although there is certainly a gray area where behavior can be inferred from ideology, which comes dangerously close to religion.
But still the actions of the Trump regime don't recognize such niceties. Their decisions are those of government, not private companies, and go much further by being clearly corrupt in many cases. They make no secret of the intent to win by a combination of delay and impoverishment, regardless of the ultimate decisions of courts.
Or are they just being paid by foreign adversaries to blow up American democracy. Maybe they know exactly what they are doing.
It’s interesting that the actual dangers of wokeism are something they almost never articulate. As in, exactly who does it hurt and how? They answer this with abstractions (the victim of wokeism is “western civilization”). When pressed to identify tangible harms, they will make something up about forced gender-reassignment surgeries on kids. When you really press them to point to something supported by evidence, they will mention a journalist who was fired.
As Mark Maron put it, the Democrats annoyed the average American into fascism
Good summary Mike. If only folks were more aware of the consequences of their cognitive biases. One could hear the echo of Tversky and Kahneman in your writing. Well done. Keep up the good work.
"This isn’t objective analysis—it’s cognitive capture disguised as intellectual sophistication."
"You become professionally invested in being wrong about the relative dangers facing democracy."
"It’s like declaring grammar police a greater threat to English literature than book burners while helping the book burners eliminate libraries."
Prescient words!! I would call it hypocrisy, but it's almost too subtle for that -- collective gaslighting comes to mind
Thank you!
I don't understand how the educated Liberal middle thinks they can just chill while all of this continues to grow. From their perspective, their is a rising demagogue on their right and an increasingly deranged mob on their left, both saying they refuse to allow the status quo to continue, and instead of trying to negotiate a workable solution they just sip their tea, repeat "End of History" a few times, and then start pondering how to profit off the suffering until everyone gets bored and settles down. Innocent bystanders don't do well during periods of sectarian violence in which warring groups see their opponents as so immoral they're evil.
While I generally agree with your analysis Mike I think you omitted one other latent variable, Israel.
Bari Weiss, whatever she claims to be, is someone who got her start attacking Columbia faculty for being insufficiently pro-Israel. She made a big point of these attacks and her role in them did, I think, help elevate her to the Times. Ironically Greenwald, of all people, called her out for persecuting Arabs under the guise of free speech.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-falsely-denies-her-years-of-attacks-on-the-academic-freedom-of-arab-scholars-who-criticize-israel/
She was an ardent proponent of Cancel Culture before it became cooler to be against it, and the one thread that connects both her attacks and her complaints is Israel. I think this is in line with your point about Taibbi and Greenwald and their obsessions blinding them to the risks. This is also consistent with what triggered some other anti-cancel-culture types. She was triggered by criticism of Israel while Taibbi was triggered by accusations of sexism.
I found this outlet by looking at who Sam Harris reads—I sincerely hope he read this one in particular.
The algorithms don't reward proportional thinking. They reward single subject repetition. To be proportional in your posts, is to slowly disappear. If a writer does nothing more than write more of what gains traction, they will evolve their writing, possibly unconsciously toward a single subject. I'm not excusing their behavior, but showing how a busy person can be shaped by the platforms.
This is an excellent essay. The problem is not the greed of opportunists (though they are part of the problem). The problem is that self-government is difficult and messy, because humanity is difficult and messy. Authoritarian government is easy and neat. It has been the dominant form of government for most of human history. Prehistory was egalitarian by default. But as soon as we congregated, hierarchical structures developed. Sometimes it was good to have everyone pulling in one direction. Progress happened under authoritarian government. BUT, much like the scientific method, democracy has caused more human progress in a shorter period of time than any authoritarian government. Trial and error in the marketplace of ideas created our modern world. We are victims of our own success. Much like the ignorance of refusing vaccination because you've never seen a child die of polio or diphtheria, choosing autocrats because you find gay pride or Black history or anything different than you annoying or scary leads you to lose your freedom. You've never been at risk of losing your freedom, so you don't think it'll happen to you. But it will. "First they came for the Jews..." People like Greenwald, et al are just as blind as their readers to this.