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[sebastian_dangerfield]

OK, and my argument is that the government never had "control" in any sense of a smaller media.

Gurri's proofs suggest you're not correct there. He cites numerous examples of the Big Three and newspapers agreeing to refrain from printing certain stories/criticisms of the govt in the 50s and early 60s. This all changed in the 70s.

Government failures on important issues are not easily bullshitted away. See, e.g., Vietnam or the Great Depression. It's not like people were stupid and then the internet came along.

The Internet came along and people are still quite stupid. Possibly more so. When the Big Three maintained standards, certain narratives were encouraged and others not. Cronkite was considered a rebel for stating what everyone suspected on Vietnam.

Do they? Is the problem that the public expects too much from the government, or is the problem that hard problems are hard to solve?

Gurri argues that govt lies about its power to keep its power. It proclaims it can fix everything because a credulous and demanding public insists it do so. Carter, Bush I and II, and Obama told the truth about the economy being beyond govt control. They've since been savaged as cautious enablers of a bad status quo.

Trump and Reagan both promised everybody a pony. Trump remains a beloved demagogue to his Montagnard army of lunatics (26% of voters). Reagan's practically sainted. Neither fixed anything.

Bringing back jobs is hard. They went somewhere else for a reason.

Bush II said this once. So did McCain. They didn't say it twice.

Fixing inequality and poverty is hard. A lot of people like inequality.

How does one fix it? Green New Deal? Nope. Redistribution? Nope... and why bother with redistribution when you have MMT. If MMT works, just create a UBI and let's be done with it.

This is a nice story, but have you considered an alternative explanation? Some voters like change, and will vote for the opposition. Some voters always vote for the same party, but they are more energized to vote against the opposition than to vote for their own party, so they turn out more when the other party is in power. Both of those are real phenomena that explain why elections go back and forth.

Gurri calls this the politics of negation. He sees it on both sides and he sees it as the primary driver of modern politics. Nobody has any ideas. A low information public, tribalized into warring factions, just want to burn down the other side.

Also, your "every four years" point needs some thought. Presidents who run for re-election usually get re-elected. Trump was an exception, because he was so terrible, but before him you have to go back to 1992 and George H.W. Bush. And I would wager that Obama would have beat Trump in 2016, if he hadn't been term-limited.

I suspected this would be the response. Correct my earlier statement to "every two years."

What does go back and forth is Congress. Part of that is that off-year elections favor Republicans, because a lot of people turn out to vote only in presidential elections, and they skew Democratic. But that's another feature explaining flip-flop results that has nothing to do with your guy's theory.

Except in 2018 the Democrats turned out and whacked Trump.

Is it a newsflash that politicians oversell? Is this not a feature of most advertising? Do people lose faith in companies and consumer goods because the products they buy have been oversold?

No. But Gurri's point is that this cycle of overselling creates a terminally cynical, reactive, and tribal "public." And where his point is most interesting is that he doesn't blame politicians as much as he does the public. He posits that the public forces them to lie about their abilities more and more outrageously and becomes more and more angry when the lies are discovered after the politicians have failed to deliver that which was promised. The delta between what is demanded and what is delivered grows wider. This seems proven by the chasm between what Biden is going to get passed and what the unrealistic progressives in his party demand. It is also proven by the insanity of Trump's "I'll bring back the jobs" pitch and subsequent failure to do so.

That's an excellent idea. Let's elect a new public.

Gurri pretty much argues exactly that point. We are not in decay solely because the institutions are in decay, as pundits often assert. We're in decay because our public is overly populated with unrealistic people, our institutions are run by a mix of opportunists and incompetent "elites" who are anything but, and the system is figure-headed by scared politicians who'll offer whatever lie gets them re-elected.

At the risk of outing myself (ha), I have taken a class from Sandel. He's smart. But is the problem "merit"? If you think for a second about what you say about, the problem is not "merit," it's that the upper middle class (etc.) have real advantages because they have more money.

He acknowledges this is part of the problem.

The issue is not a Harvard degree is an arbitrary metric, the issue is that a Harvard degree tends to signal some measure of qualification, Jared Kushner aside. (Is it a perfect measure of merit? Of course not. But nothing is.)

His point is deeper. He argues that merit as a measure breeds anger and resentment as manifest in out politics today. In British class structures, one could blame failure on lack of luck in birth. Lack of luck in birth is still a huge part of failure here, but instead of admitting that, our "merit" system blames the unlucky for their own failings. Sandel argues this is terrible for social cohesion and allows upper middle class people to duck the argument that much of what one achieves or fails to achieve is dependent on luck.

If you doubt that merit is being used to avoid that conversation, next time you're sitting with a professional who enjoyed an upper middle class upbringing, suggest to him that luck of daddy paying for his education and helping him with connections is largely responsible for his success. Oh my will you get a face full of angry bullshit in response.

Everyone pays lip service to merit, but there are an awful lot of policies out there that undercut it, like funding public education locally, which ensures that people who live in expensive neighborhoods don't have to share their schools. The problem is not merit, it's an insufficient commitment to it.

Sandel addresses that as well. He imagines a world of true merit. (This is near impossible, he notes, because much of merit is just doing well on standardized tests at the right times in life, which is a poor measure of who is deserving of anything in his estimation. [It's also gamed by the affluent via tutors.]) He sees that world as the worst of dystopias. Those lucky enough to be born with the right talents for the time would get the spoils and those who were unlucky would be unequivocally entirely responsible for their own failures.

Sandel sees no difference between being born lucky in terms of intelligence and being born lucky in terms of money. Both as he sees it are things over which one has no control. I think his argument is weak there because I think raw intelligence is cultivated to useful and marketable intelligence, and he doesn't seem to address that. But regardless, the book provides, like most of his work, some fascinating considerations.