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[sebastian_dangerfield]

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

It's a level of control many multiples that of which exists today.

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.

The point is Cronkite broke ranks when he criticized the war. It took many years before he did so. Today, the criticisms of such a war would emerge before it even started. The govt's hands are tied from the start.

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

I don't. I also don't think it refutes the assertion that the govt cannot fix everything, or that people should not expect it to fix everything. That certain fixes would be difficult and probably or likely impossible are not mutually exclusive points. Gurri isn't saying don't try. He's advocating pragmatic acceptance of reality: There are many big problems the govt cannot fix -- many more than the govt or the demanding "public" likes to admit.

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 say Gurri says X. You say what about Y? I say Gurri addresses Y also. You then say Y and X are mutually exclusive. They aren't.

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!

Agreed.

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

I'm saying the public's unrealistic expectations are a cause of govt lying and further cynicism and erosion of authority deriving from those lies. Are you suggesting the govt lies for a reason other than to satisfy or deceive the public? If so, I'd ask, why? What would that risk potentially gain for the govt? The main reason the govt lies is to stay in power. To stay in power it must stay in good relations with the public that votes for it.

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.

I hear you. My response to that has been offered, but I'll offer it once more. This time is different because the internet is ubiquitous, decentralized, and controlled by the public to an extent no previous medium has been previously. The printing pres, radio, and TV are not credibly analogous.

This has sped up the "spin" processes of the past such that the spin is junk. Anyone can see thru it in an instant. It took years and years of degradation of talent within institutional management/govt to expose that the power structures within a society were decayed and incompetent. Today that happens almost daily. Govt says X and within 20 minutes an analyst has dismantled X and shown its flaws. Case in point -- Biden's BBB. The deltas between Administration-projected and realistically objectively expected revenues to pay for the bill were available everywhere, with supporting formulae, within days of the announcement of its specifics.

Same with Trump's tax cuts. Its delivery of outsized benefits to the wealthy and r/e investors were on the front page of most media outlets days after its initial sketches were out.

The emperor's closet is empty before he could even hope to put on clothes.

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.

I agree with all of this. The important note Sandel adds is that one hundred years ago the losers could say they were part of a rigged system because class was still considered as important as merit. Now, he suggests, the losers can't point to systemic inequities as much because merit is viewed as the sole measuring stick.

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!

Indeed! I am flabbergasted. Your pointing to other sources of moral philosophy has Blown My Mind.

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.

Rawls was taught in my high school. We had a socialist (self-described) history/intl relations teacher who gave a helicopter view of every source of social justice policies he could summon. (He ran into some issues with the board over some strong anti-Reagan lessons.)

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

And thus we come back to the least creative fixation: Ignoring Gurri's point which is broader than politics and instead suggesting, absurdly:

If only the Democrats had total control, they'd could fix it all, or at least most of it.

Wrong. They'd at best fix it at the margins. That's Gurri's point.

Is that a little bit better? Of course. Is it what the "public" wants? Is it the fix the portion of our society chaffing under inequality desires or thinks the govt can provide? Not Even Close.