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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

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.

That's not "control," and there are certainly more recent examples.

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.

OK, but so what. The government trying to bullshit away failure in Vietnam is not the same as the government successfully bullshitting away failure in Vietnam. One happened and the other didn't.

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.

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

OK.

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.

OK. My point was that getting any of these things done is hard, and you don't seem to disagree.

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.

You said, Gurri says x.
I said, but what about y? If y is true, then that's a different explanation for x.
So you say, Gurri says y.

I take it that you want me to agree that Gurri is brilliant, whatever he says. Got it. Gurri is brilliant. He seems to have figured it all out.

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

OK.

Except in 2018 the Democrats turned out and whacked Trump.

Yes. Off elections favor Republicans relative to presidential elections, *and* Trump was such a train wreck that Democrats turned out strongly in 2018. Both can be true!

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.

No, it's not proven by it. You are not distinguishing between causation and correlation.

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.

Why do we think things are fundamentally different from any other time in history? I don't think the public is more stupid or politicians more prone to overpromise, so I think you need to look elsewhere for an explanation. That is my fundamental response to Gurri. Not sure you are hearing me.

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.

I really don't think it's all that different from the response you would have gotten if you had suggested the same about class in the UK a hundred years ago. There is structural inequality that benefits the people with money, they like it that way, and it's important for them to believe that there's a moral justification for it. Lots of people want to hear that, and they are the people that advertisers want to sell to, so we have media that reinforces what they believe. It's hegemonic, dude.

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.

It may surprise you to hear that there are other moral philosophers who are a part of this same conversation. Sandel's former Harvard colleague, John Rawls, constructed A Theory Of Justice to address this problem of the inequality of the initial distribution of resources. Sandel has taught Rawls in his classes!

Just to give you a sneak preview before you go and wrestle with A Theory Of Justice, which is pretty turgid, the basic idea is that if you were to ask people what kind of society they would want to live in and they were ignorant about the sort of lot they would be born to, they would want to be in a society with some protections for everyone -- maybe healthcare, and a minimum income, etc. You can quibble about the details, but that's the gist. In other words, some redistribution of resources to ensure that the worst-off among us aren't that badly off.

In other words, the sort of thing the Democratic Party tends to advocate for, and the Republican Party tends to oppose.