Hey guys! It’s been a slow few weeks. But let’s just jump right on in…
Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by my favorite history writer, Mike Duncan, is out. I absolutely loved this quote: “Memory is the intelligence of fools”. So true!
Mike’s Revolutions podcast also has a good item for us this week. It’s really interesting how the early days of the Russian Revolution fit so well into the CIZST frame. Basically, what Mike describes is two “sides” of armed street partisans forming pretty quickly in the power vacuum left by the tsar’s abdication. As CIZST explains, even the basic exercise of government power is essentially a zero-sum thing — you’re either in charge, or you’re not.
Now, there’s a really cool wrinkle that also happened here: the Petrograd Soviet didn’t immediately seize power, instead preferring to pass the buck to the Duma for the next several months. Why on Earth would they do such a thing? Because the Russians were in the middle of a losing war! WWI, of course. Whoever held power was going to take blame for the same shitstorm that forced the tsar to abdicate.
Another Duncan item: In the run-up to the French Revolution, we have another example of CIZST. One early controversy was whether the Estates-General would vote by estate, or by head. Customarily, the crown depended on them voting by estate — each estate got a single vote. So as long as the crown could keep two of the three (nobles, clergy, and commoners) united against the other, the crown won the day.
It’s pretty obvious that “vote by estate” is essentially a Winner-Take-All scenario, so that’s the zero-sum part. It also divides by two intersections: class and religion. And, of course, this is the origin of the modern political conceptions of right and left — two opposed sides. There’s also a hefty dose of Duncan’s Entropy of Victory that fuels the constant chaos, but otherwise the setup here pretty neatly fits CIZST.
With Texas’ effective abortion ban going into effect, time will only tell whether my Abortion Depolarization Hypothesis will bear out. I’d caution that we should expect only a partial depolarization, for two reasons. On the abstract level, since the victory itself is incomplete, not all single-issue pro-lifers would be convinced it was safe to demobilize. On the practical level, ideological cross-pollination in the conservative movement is pretty thorough, so we’d expect most self-describedly “single-issue” pro-lifers to stay in the GOP camp, shifting to other GOP hobby-horses as their new single issue.
However, precisely because of all that cross-pollination and various other factors fueling polarization of the shrinking American middle, elections these days are decided on slim margins, particularly in states like Texas where the gap is closing, so every demobilization and defection counts. Thus even if the vast majority of Texas pro-lifers stay with the GOP, a few tens of thousands dropping out might help Texas’s growing population of urban and suburban Democrats to finally tip the scale.
Come to think of it, the Mass Effect 3 ending actually is a decent explanation of the Fermi Paradox — perhaps there IS an ancient alien race of synthetics which periodically “mows the lawn” of spacefaring organic life before any can build a galactic civilization that can go around contacting pre-warp civilizations like ours.
Just saying. It would totally explain why we haven’t met any aliens yet.
Tuesday’s Ezra Klein Show: Maybe I’m just nuts, but the reason why I’m constantly prattling on about CIZST and history and narrative is that I’ve gotten so sick of “politics” consisting of (1) horse race coverage, (2) dumb, pointless fights over policy reforms that rarely ever happen, which is chiefly because (3) most political fundamentals are driven by dumb, pointless fights over identity, with serious policy the intellectual fig leaf hiding the shame of naked tribalism.
Maybe in a country with a healthy political system, I’d be able to enjoy this stuff again. But the filibuster + FPTP + SMD + WTA in the Electoral College pretty much mean that if you want to see anything done about your political ideals, you can either spend decades of your life as an activist or aspiring politician mostly failing to achieve change, or you can just give up and start trying to understand why nothing’s happening.
The only thing that mitigates my existential depression about the above, is vain, selfish pride in having at least been intelligent enough to figure it all out. Sometimes you just have to take your wins when you can get them!
Just on the merits, China’s new restrictions on multiplayer gaming would probably help bring back single player games again.
Last Week’s Pod Save The World: Apparently we’re afraid of the Russians targeting our VP with their Havana Syndrome weapons now?
Look, not to be a jingoist, but by jingo, this is unacceptable! They should be afraid of us, and the nuclear and/or cyber hellfire we’d rain on their sorry asses if they had the gall to personally assault one of our principals.
Moreover, we have a democratic society with a proper succession of leadership and regular, somewhat-still-respected elections with mostly-peaceful transfer of power. Putin… doesn’t. He’s irreplaceable to himself. He’s the one who should be worried, not us. POTUS and VPOTUS get permanently incapacitated? You get to talk to a President Pelosi leading an American people so incomprehensibly furious that we’ll forget how much we hate each other (and her) for just long enough to make Putin regret whatever stupid 5G microwave weapon he’s got the K̶G̶B̶ FSB futzing around with. Putin gets permanently incapacitated because he fucked with the wrong superpower? We get to deal with either Navalny or whichever oligarch manages to knock Navalny off. It’s no contest.
Relocation vs. Incarceration: One of the factors that influences recidivism is environment. A first-time convict often offends within a broken environment - a depressed neighborhood, friends who are bad influences, threats from rivals, etc. And then we toss them into an environment filled with other convicts! Hardened and traumatized by an environment filled with threats, we then toss them back out onto hostile streets, with family whom they have grown detached from, a community that barely has enough legitimate jobs for non-convicts, and friends willing to give them criminal jobs.
Perhaps part of the solution relies on getting them out of this series of hostile environments. This would probably have to be a voluntary program, since coercive relocation is a human rights violation only rivaled by what our existing system violates — after all, just as prison involuntarily robs them of their existing family ties, so would forced relocation.
What I’m envisioning is a sort of hybrid system of halfway houses (for the least violent) and foster care (for those who would be disruptions to others) that gives adolescents and young adults the space to properly process the challenges they’ve faced in early life, and helps build the skills to integrate as productive members of society. Perhaps these could even operate similar to the kibbutzes — the house itself is some sort of subsidized or nonprofit enterprise where the residents contribute their labor.
Anyways, it’s not going to solve mass incarceration, but as “an option”, it’s enticing. Give people the strength to stand up on their own, without the challenges of the environments that hurt them in the first place.
Last Thursday’s Pod Save America: “You have Republicans running against the Democrats, and centrists running against the Democrats, and that’s how you lose.”
Great line. It’s a pretty obvious expression of zero-sum politics, but I like how the PSA crew in this discussion really outlined centrism as an identity-based political valence, not an ideology-based one. To wit, they call out centrism as an identity because the identity is always “the middle”, not moderation. A moderate takes a proposal like Medicare For All and tries to make it less extreme and more palatable; a centrist runs against the proposal as “too extreme” and comes back with a “compromise” that tries to split the difference between the status quo and the extreme.
And this is what the PSA crew is trying to get at in the quote! The real difference to the Democratic party is that centrists run against the party from within, while moderates run for the party.
At the same time, I disagree with their contention that Democrats should hide this centrist revolt behind some closed doors. The part you should hide is the response to the centrist revolt: recognize centrism for what it is, and purge the center-left of centrists, to be replaced by moderates who can sell the same bill of goods to the center as the centrists do, but are actually loyal to the party.
Centrists are always going to exist. And I’m not saying they’re evil, they’re just an obstacle to party discipline, which Democrats dearly need. But at the same time, Democrats also need moderates, who are the only candidates who can keep the party competitive in the swing districts that nationally lean against Democrats. So, let the centrists be Republicans’ problem. If they can’t tell the difference between a disloyal centrist and a loyal moderate, so much the better for Democrats. But as long as it basically makes very little difference whether you’re running a moderate or a centrist for swing votes, the party is almost always better off running moderates, because they don’t undermine the party by running against it.
That may sound brutal or hypocritical coming from someone who never misses a chance to criticize the two-party system, but it’s just an acknowledgement of the realities we face in trying to evolve the system towards something better.
Some thoughts as an acquaintance goes off to be a cop: I don’t like to make too big a deal of linking too many issues across a coalition, since it makes our party less flexible, but in terms of minimizing police violence, it really would help if there were simply fewer guns in America.
Speaking of shots fired… Vox is becoming a farce at this point. Without the discipline of Klein and Yglesias at the helm, the place is a disaster zone.
Go look at their front page: Barely any current events, all “standard liberal agenda” programming. It’s fucking embarrassing! Klein and Yglesias’ Vox would have had wall-to-wall coverage of the terror attack in Kabul — explainers, straight news, videos, and so on.
Vox is no longer fit to print. It’s just a bunch of self-obsessed late Millennials and Zoomers who can’t be bothered to stop carping about their little pissant concerns long enough to see the world burning down around them. I’m no fan of Umar Haque anymore, but he’s absolutely right that this is what a decadent left looks like.
For. Fucking. Shame.
These idiots need to get their moral center back if they want to be anything more than a bad leftist rag going forward.
Anyways, pay attention for a little more extended Afghanistan take later today or this weekend. Happy Labor Day!
Oh, and FYI, there's still some good stuff at Vox, like this article from today:
https://www.vox.com/22675358/us-car-deaths-year-traffic-covid-pandemic
You can see the decadent left in action in this Democratic Socialists of America meeting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ
Seriously, this sort of stuff will kill any energy and momentum the DSA tries to build. And there go our chances of any serious reform.