Dave's Daily Dose 10/21/2021

LGB... T

Down at one end of my neighborhood, there’s a drawbridge over the Norwalk River, where the control tower periodically sounds out a trio of horn blasts to warn the area that the bridge will be raised to allow a boat to pass through.

This signal just so happens to strongly resemble a fan tradition of my St. Louis Blues, where a fan simply known as “The Horn Guy” will thrice blow an airhorn, to which the crowd lustily cheers “Let’s… Go… Blues!”. He does it 2-3 times at a normal/quick pace, and then one last time he’ll drag out the blasts, to which the crowd emphasizes its own response. On the internet, fans often salute each other with a simple acronym: “LGB”.

Thus, several times a day while working from home, I answer the drawbridge’s call with my own hearty “LGB!”.

The obvious joke, of course, is that this acronym is only one letter away from the more popular “LGBT” moniker, and St. Louis sports radio hosts and internet fans alike are no strangers to acknowledging this. The team even uses it in their promotional materials for LGBT appreciation events! I’d like to think that, in some small way, this has helped make our fan base an island of tolerance in a sport not otherwise known for its tolerant ways. Which is one of those small victories. It’s not like the Blues organization is incredibly woke or anything, but they manage to avoid controversy, and deal with it well when they can’t. That’s a lot more than can be said about most pro sports franchises.

There’s a lot more to this story, but for now, the home opener’s on Saturday. So, Let’s Go Blues!

• I finally got caught up with the Fall of Civilizations Podcast, which allowed me to get back to my regular book schedule and finish Barack Obama’s latest book, A Promised Land. It was a solid book, and lent a lot of insight into his mindset, especially the strategic decisions he made in the first few years of his term, whose political legacy we are still grappling with as a country.

  The one thing that stuck out to me was his theory of compromise: roughly, “I wanted to catch them by surprise when I already had the upper hand”. Pretty quickly after explaining this, he admits that he had underestimated the other side’s ability to shape the narrative, which undergirded their willingness to simply refuse to cooperate. Up to that point in American history, the minority had generally been afraid to be seen as too obstructionist, but with their own media/propaganda machine up and running on all cylinders, they could manage to keep their own base onside without risking angering them.

  I guess what’s remarkable about this is that for someone who had made hay on properly understanding a new medium’s potential — to wit, the internet and small-donor organizing — he completely whiffed on properly understanding a new development in an existing (but not all-that-old) medium.

• On a (spiritually) similar note, a throughline I noticed in the Fall of Civilizations Podcast was that each empire’s enemies were never able to diagnose the hegemon’s biggest weakness — or, on the rare occasions they did manage to, it was well after losing practically everything to the hegemon.

  The simple explanation is probably that old ignorances kept them focused on tribalistic perspectives: “the hated foreign conqueror invaded and violated us and our women, so let us obsess about those violations instead of bothering to understand who these evil interlopers are and how to beat them”. History thus generally favors empire formation — the conquered are too busy being traumatically assaulted to think straight enough to put together an effective counter — and empires are never conquered from without before conquering themselves from within.

  I suspect that this bias in perspective is also why we’ve traditionally thought of empires’ collapses as tragedies. Gibbon bent over backwards to cast Rome as a victim of barbarian depredations and its own immorality; but what about the perspective of the Goth whose people remember their children being sold into slavery by the corrupt Roman garrison on the Danube, who now sees his people having integrated into and conquered the Roman power structure, replacing its emperor with their own kings? Odoacer doubtless saw no tragedy in any of that. Empires themselves were victim to the exact same xenophobia that causes us to see their collapses as tragedy; it’s just that they had the upper hand in the original conflicts of conquest.

  Anyways, the big takeaway here is, modern times threaten to finally upend this dynamic, if they haven’t already. It’s not that we’re in some special snowflake historical era of tolerance; intolerance abounds as it always has. But globalization means we know more about the “barbarians” over yonder hill than any set of competing empires/civilizations ever has before. Even if we still don’t like them, we have a better chance of understanding who they are and what makes them tick.

  Russia and China today are actually pretty good exemplars of this dynamic. Both are caught up in as much suspicion, blind ambition, and ruthless intolerance at their very highest levels, as any of the great conquerors of old¹. And yet, both have America clocked pretty well (!!) — as an aging hegemon whose internal divisions and archaic institutions have left it paralyzed; still wielding great power to counter any direct threat, but unable to prevent its open society from allowing it to be covertly undermined anymore.

  I don’t want to oversell this, but it’s pretty profound. It may end up being the first time an empire has ever been toppled from without by an enemy who actually understands and has rather quickly diagnosed how to exploit its internal contradictions/weaknesses, rather than having to wait for those contradictions to play themselves out.

• Here’s my entry in the popularism debate; and it’s a rather hot take at that!

  To wit: Why are we even bothering listening to Democrats who live in areas that are wasting their votes?

  I mean, every party needs its strongholds. Duh. But we in fact have such wide margins in the blue states that even if those progressives mostly sat out several elections, as long as we’d remain competitive in swing states, we’d stand half a chance.²

  For the record… I live in a Democratic stronghold. I may be a con-prog, but that still makes me at heart a progressive, not a liberal, and definitely not a moderate. While of course I’d love for everyone to always listen to me personally — otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing this blog — I indeed am arguing here that the party should not listen to people like me… which admittedly includes me.

  Anyways, the original Matt Yglesias elucidation of popularism was pretty agreeable to con-progs like me, who are trying to be realistic about getting closer to utopia, instead of relying on dumb theories like “leverage”, but it seems like the debate has gone in a predictably different direction. In fact, I even identified this dynamic about intellectual movements… checks notes… 4 whole months ago³!

  Yglesias this week did a good job of articulating an anti-popularist position, but the way he brought in “deliverism” as an alternative rang hollow for me, because it strikes me that the progressives making insane tactical decisions in Congress right now are actually just borrowing from both philosophies: “We have to deliver extreme policies because They’re Actually Already Really Popular, not just because They Will Be Popular”.

  At the end of the day, we need to start cutting through the bullshit here. I think the simplest statement which we can genuinely conclude to be true, is that popularism is essentially just a restatement or refinement of Median Voter Theory. And my major criticism of MVT is that it should account for each individual electorate in every race, not be applied in some hand-wavey aggregate of national politics.

  That means that what’s most popular in the Bronx is progressivism, so progressives should run on that, and anyone to the right doesn’t have much of a hope of winning over more voters than they lose by running to the right. It meant that for Eric Adams running citywide, he was able to garner more votes from a broader coalition than that of the same progressives who won other races in the Bronx. It meant that Joe Manchin and Joe Biden had to run to the right of the party on a lot of things to win in WV and in the swing states, respectively. And it means that the Build Back Better plan probably needs to be less ambitious than the “total progressive victory” version the media was reporting on earlier in the year during their sugar rush over the American Rescue Plan.

  And it also means that the priorities of the Bronx shouldn’t be allowed to hold hostage the priorities of swing-state moderates. It’s not so much an either-or — margins are so thin that we can’t afford to lose either. We need both. Which means cutting out the bullshit brinksmanship and putting together legislature that the entire party can deliver on. Because what absolutely is true about deliverism is that any failures now, exacerbate the risk of strengthening the next coup attempt.

1. For one, I genuinely believe Putin has come to hate the West. He may not have started out that way, but he views liberal democracy as a sham and a danger.

2. There is a risk that we end up like the pre-Trump GOP: by leaving our base dissatisfied for too long, eventually the inmates decide to seize control of the asylum.

But this is also not a slam-dunk comparison. For starters, the Democrats aren’t dependent on a one-stop-shop propaganda vehicle spending all its time whipping our base into a frothing fervor just to keep Democratic voters “voting against their interests”. We instead have dozens of media outlets and independent publications catering to each faction’s interest, which includes a handful of dumb leftie conspiracy rags that no one really listens to.

We also don’t have a single issue (like immigration for the pre-Trump GOP) where a large proportion of the people I’m proposing to ignore would be happy to defect to the other side, or where a backlash would attract a large swath of the other side’s voters and/or mobilize non-voters (as Trump’s on immigration did). Instead, we have a handful of issues where the progressive orthodoxy is a liability in most swing states and districts — trans rights, Defund The Police, prison abolition, a near-Puritan strain of pro-choice absolutism, etc. — and the cost of ignoring the left comes with a return of more voters from the center.

3. Third item down, about intellectual movements being fated to succumb to misinterpretation and context collapse.