Dave’s Daily Dose 3/23/22
In Putin’s Russia, You Don’t Make Jokes, Jokes Land You In Putin’s Jail
For those who don’t get it, the sub-headline is a play on the classic Russian Reversal Joke. Google it, you already know what it is.
Zelensky’s “U24” proposal last week — to establish an alliance of democracies that support each other within 24 hours — was the most moving part of his speech, for me.
In last week’s Pod Save America, the gang talked about primary reforms like Alaska’s, and the potential for reversing the deleterious influence of having a nationalized media. To be fair, or possibly not, this is a genuine question that many of the Dumb-Populism-curious rack themselves over: “How do we get back to [X old-school political norm]?”, which usually manifests in the idea that politicians should play more golf together in order to reverse a 70-year trend of polarization, because we all know that’s a totally appropriate scope match1.
The thing is, it’s important to remember that hysteresis2 is real. The way you restore a value you prize from the past is not necessarily to restore the systems of the past into the future — this is a mistake hopeful dynastic restorationists spent an embarrassing number of centuries making!3 Systems and norms that worked at one point in time, have a habit of having stopped working for very good reasons, not just on the mere whims of the Chaos Gods.
And for what it’s worth, this may actually lead to a valuable observation about what separates my personal “conprog” ideology from its progressive and conservative roots. Conservatism, in its most charitable conception of itself, says you judiciously retain certain valuable things in the face of inevitable change, and that protects you from the worst of the change while allowing you to benefit from the best parts of it. Progressivism, in its most charitable conception of itself, says that the world is unjust and full of suffering, and therefore needs to be changed to achieve justice and prevent suffering. If this requires dreaming unrealistic dreams, so be it — everything we hold dear was once an unrealistic dream, and dreams, like all narratives, have the power to make their own reality.
But as we’ve seen time and again, not every change actually prevents suffering. And conservatism has its own track record of letting its affection for the status quo blind it to suffering, and even cause suffering. Which is why conprog says that the only way we ever actually achieve progress is by accurately assessing the current reality and building a realistic path. I’m actually not saying anything all that profound; this is the sort of work that countless minds have set themselves to throughout humanity’s existence. It’s what we default to every day without even realizing it. Columbus, evil as he was, may have had a “dream” of sorts, but at the end of the day someone had to calculate how many pigs they would need to bring on board to get to “India”, if it was even there. Less heinously, my own job involves me sitting here doing “the impossible” — building machines that can make ever smaller microchips — and yet, most of the time I’m staring at the same kinds of spreadsheets every other middle-engineering schmuck does all day long.
Anyways, conprog is relevant to hysteresis because today we have conservatives and progressives suggesting all kinds of dumb things that won’t actually fix our political system. The few conservatives left who aren’t actively trying to subvert it, are obsessing over old-fashioned notions of civility, or insisting that the left needs to, well, stop being the left, because leftism annoyed the other conservatives and fueled their litany of grievances until they just couldn’t take it anymore and gave up on democracy4. The progressives think that if they just scream loud enough supporting incrementally more extreme versions of the last sixty years of voting reforms, eventually they’ll get that over the hump and it’ll solve the core problem that conservatives dare to exist.
It’s not both-sides-ism to point out that neither is actually elucidating a vision that can be called “progress” without laughter. More extreme versions of your grandparents’ progress isn’t more progress, it’s just extreme. Reinstituting norms that are dead isn’t protecting anyone from change; the change has already happened! It’s like risking your life under heavy machine gun fire to put body armor on a soldier who’s been blown to pieces by that same machine gun. Too little, too late, and the body armor isn’t what would have saved him, nor will it save your own ass from your bad decisions.
Hysteresis simply inherently dictates the conprog position that we must accurately understand where we are in order to understand how we get to where we want to go. When I’m working on one of those spreadsheets, last year’s spreadsheet won’t tell me anything about this year’s work, no matter how hard I password-protect it, and no matter how much I cook the old numbers. I have to actually make something new; and in order to do that, I need to know what work has been done, what work we have left, how that work breaks down, and who can do that work.
To me, conprog is the only way to achieve the goal of sustainable change, because hysteresis means that what didn’t work or even would have worked yesterday, might not necessarily work today. And hysteresis explains why the things everyone else are fighting for, never actually come to pass.
To spell it out, while two politicians being golf buddies may have made a difference in a very specific historical context — as many sorts of mundane factors do — those factors only do so because those contexts are causally thin. The causal thickness of our two-party doom loop means that golf is wildly inadequate in scope to solve the crisis. This is what critics of Dumb Populism are getting at when we brutally mock the hypothetical: “You really think that Mitch McConnell is ever going to stop being an asshole because Chuck Schumer shares enough scotches with him over golf?”.
IE, the idea from physics that some processes are not directly reversible. For instance, you can’t un-combust the gas in a cylinder of your car’s engine, even though that engine manages to bring the contents of the cylinder right back to the state it has just before combustion on every single cycle. The internal combustion cycle is called a “hysteresis loop” because it strings together a set of irreversible steps that form a closed loop which can keep repeating — IE, it doesn’t just sputter out after running through each step once, but rather, the last step brings you right back to the first.
To wit: “If we just put the king/heir back on the throne, everything will go back to the way it was!”. Yeah, that’s never actually happened, no matter how many times people thought it would.
However, when Ross Douthat says these kinds of things, he’ll make sure you know that he isn’t as fed up as the others, and he’ll always be willing to be patient with you. In fact, he’ll wait all eternity if he has to, until the inevitable, blessed day you come to your senses and realize he’s right.