I really appreciate the tenor of the discussion you've had with your primary interlocutor(s) above. It's been substantive and civil, and I wish every sociopolitical disagreement online could be approached in the same manner. Because of the respect I've gained for you throughout this thread I'm going to do what I seldom do online, and express something about my political point of view.
I agree with your diagnosis of the problems with American society, particularly the 'high trust' vs 'low trust' line of thought. I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.
Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism. I think that explains the H1b abuses we both deplore, the social balkanization, and also the very similar cultural, economic, and governance breakdowns simultaneously appearing in other countries across the "western/liberal" world.
I'm not saying that to spark further argument, just as prelude to: I hope you're right. If the way to re-forming a high-trust society and curing what we agree ails us is as simple as the American right posits then I will happily eat crow over the next four or eight or whatever years. That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.
I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next? I believe that's what created the mid-twentieth century cultural foundations which we'd both like to reconstruct.
> I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.
Yeah, I'm not going to deny this at all, but I must say that in the 1990s and 2000s at least among the older Millennials and younger GenX, there was a very real sense of judging people mostly by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. What has happened in the last 15 years in race and gender relationships is a massive step backwards. Even I can't help having prejudiced thoughts today as a response to these changes that me 20 years ago would have been repulsed by. I say this as a third culture kid, who is mixed race whose "plurality" leans European, but who who identifies with Europe, Latin American and a tiny smidge of Indigenous South America.
It's actually been sad to see some of the comments here where folks have expressed that "America doesn't have a culture". I know it's largely attenuated from when I was younger, but it's still palpable to me. It's sad to see that it's now so weak that many express that they don't even think it exists.
> Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism.
Couldn't agree more. I was left leaning most of my life. I remember back when Zappa testified in Congress about overzealous right leaning conservative school marms. Today, it largely feels the same but the longhouse school marms are left leaning. I'm always conflicted about self describing myself as conservative these days because while policy-wise that's where I'm out, it's mostly out of the complete failures of the left-leaning policies of those in control of every major American institution. In 20-30 years, I would not surprise if I end up back expressing support for the equivalent of left leaning policies in 2050 or so in the event the right successfully takes back these institutions. Ultimately, I just want to be left alone and want to see everyone else left alone as well.
I'm also in complete agreement that its the blind pursuit of economic policy that serves those in power that's been most contributory to the destruction of American culture. If I read correctly a full 1 in 5 working adults in America are immigrants. That's wildly high and it's insane to me than anyone can argue that hasn't depressed wages, increased pressure on housing costs (which increases the cost of living across the board).
That said, this all falls under the research of George Borjas, who has done an amazing job documenting the impact of immigration workers on the American workers. But it isn't the whole story. He has a colleague at Harvard, whose work is equally important in this discussion and that is the work of Robert Putnam, who has done the largest and most comprehensive studies documenting the decline of civic engagement in America. His work is summarized in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community", but his larger body of work merits attention.
The disintegration of homogenous communities and replacement with heterogenous communities has creation circumstances where groups are fighting with one another.
One of the seminal lessons I've learn in my life personally is that politics rises when things balkanize. Instead of a single culture rowing together in the same direction to grow the size of the pie, they instead fight against one another to grow the size of their piece of the pie. I've seen this happen in America broadly in the time I've lived here, but I've also seen it up close and personally while working at one of Silicon Valley's best known unicorns.
I feel like I joined the company relatively late at around employee ~2000 and engineer ~200, but by the time I left about 10 years later, I was among the 25 most tenured employees at the company and had seen probably 10000 engineers pass through the company and who knows how many total employees. My guess is 50k or more.
The last 4 years or so were painful. The company went from one where everyone had shared economic incentives (stock options) and a shared mission, to one with fiefdoms everywhere and everyone just trying to further their career and the career of their manager or skip level. By the time I left, my guess is that I could count those folks that I worked with that still truly believed in the mission of the company on two hands. Which is nothing in a company of 25k+ active employees.
I sincerely believe we can get back to a unified culture, but it's going to require something drastic like the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 to stop the bleeding and then one to two generations to pass to allow for those here to figure out how to form one new common American identity. That's not to say we shouldn't allow anyone in, but it should only be allowing those in that truly benefit all Americans and not just the American oligarchy.
> That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.
I too am skeptical, but I'd put the emphasis more specifically on globalists and the deep state. Between all that's happened with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Massive, Jeffrey Epstein, P Diddy, Twitter Files, revelations from Mike Benz, Hunter Biden laptop, etc. etc. etc., I have very little confidence that corruption from those in economic and political control will actually be held to account.
> I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next?
Yes and no. I'm absolutely willing to condemn what you're describing as "my side's ideas", but I have no confidence in the ideas you're talking about as well. I've seen them fail both in this country and the country I'm from.
The ideas I want to see tried out are neither Republican or Democrat ideas. I want to take a wrecking ball to power structures in America. Everything deep state related needs to go.
The analogy I use as a sailor (which should also be familiar to anyone who has kitesurfed), is the idea of "depowering" the sails. Right now, we have instutitions with way too much power and all that power is a massive magnet for the most corruptible people. Orwell said "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", but their is more to it than that. Absolute power also absolutely attracts the absolutely corrupted. I'd love to see far more decentralization and power back at the state and local level. I'd love to see every major institution under the Executive branch either dismantled or spread across medium-sized cities all across the country.
Back before we had the Department of Education, we relied on 50 department of educations in each of 50 states trying things out. Some had good ideas, but some had bad ideas, but those with bad ideas had the option of copyingt those experiencing success with their policies.
I've seen this exact same situation at the big company I left. For the first 5-6 years anyone with an idea had to first implement that idea, prove it out and then scale it up. Eventually, everything became command and controls and now every idea could no longer be experimented with and scaled up. Instead they had to be implemented by or get the blessing of the annointed ones with power and if considered acceptable could only be implemented company-wide or not at all. With that approach, I saw so many "ideas" that were ram-rodded through as multi-year efforts, many of which failed, but failed only after their original "sponsor" was promoted and had moved on, leaving a wake of destruction for others to clean up.
The closest equivalent to this is what's happened with Milei in Argentina. I'm still skeptical of him as an individual, but what he's achieved has been nothing short of remarkable.
If I could have one wish for America, it would be that the bulk of my taxes went to my local jurisdiction first, then state and only pennies were left over for federal only for those things that can only be handled at the federal level like national defense (but only acted upon with the blessing of 50 states).
One of the biggest failures I think with our Constitution are that representation wasn't designed to scale. When the first Congress was established the US had 3.9 million people. Today, it's 346 million. In 1789, with the first Congress, we had 26 senators and approximately 65 representatives by the end. The ratio in 1789 was 43k people to each member of Congress. Today it is 643k.
This is a failure to scale because each citizen has a far smaller voice and it's much cheaper for those in power to corrupt 538 members of Congress today. Had we scaled proportionately (43k to 1), Congress would have just over 8000 members. IMHO, that would be far healthier because it would be far more expensive for special interests to buy their way into getting a majority of votes of 8000+ members of Congress.
Anyways, that's enough for now. I could go on forever on this. Again, I appreciate your comment.
TBF, I'm not against wealth transfers and infrastructure investments. I just think they should be handled as close to the local level as possible.
Wealth transfers for example worked better when Churches and other local community institutions were involved. They'd collect directly from their parishioners and provide support directly to those that need help. This is a system that is highly accountable to the people providing help and keeps those receiving help accountable for "helping themselves" and not just mooching.
Same with infrastructures. With infrastructure, there are times, that some big may have value, but very rarely does it require the scale of the state or the federal government. The biggest of infrastructure projects are rarely larger than an economic region (e.g. SF Bay Area. Seattle Metro area. etc.).
The interstate highway system is like the only infrastructure project that benefits from Federal involvement.
Right now, doing through the Federal government provides far too little accountability for results and spending money wisely.
Beyond elements of nuance and emphasis I don't disagree with anything you've said. For instance, I completely agree with the philosophy of localism and federalism and "de-powering the sails" that you lay out. (And yes, the House of Representatives should be scaled!) At the present moment I just... Prioritize de-powering corporations over government, because if we do it the other way around there will be nothing restraining the further concentration of power in, and the further corruption of government / society at, their hands.
Where I think we part company is in our assessments of the current American "left" and "right" parties. I see more energy towards de-centralization (both corporate and governmental) in some younger politicians within the Democratic party, and a firm intent to increase corporate power within the GOP.
But, it gives me hope to see so much substantive agreement with someone who's chosen to vote the other way, and I genuinely hope that I've misjudged the incoming administration. If it all works out as you believe it will, then I'll be happy to have been wrong. Thanks again.
The way I see it, the overly powerful government and corporate institutions are two sides of the same coin. There's been so much revolving door activity and corporate capture of government, that depowering either in either order yields a weakening of the other.
One person that I can't recommend enough is Mike Benz, if you've never checked out his videos. He's an absolute fountain of knowledge, it's just that there is such a vast spiderweb of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there (finance, military, media, tech, censorship, etc.) that it's impossible to convey in short media clips.
Once, you've seen enough of the links between government and corporations pointed out by him and others that are watchdogging, you start seeing it everywhere. You literally can't turn on a single MSM news show today and not see "expert" after "expert" that if you dig in are just cutouts for the vast web of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there and how there are so many innocuously named institutions, think tanks and NGOs that are quietly guiding so much of what is happening from behind the scenes and manufacturing narratives.
What I see in the new administration has less to do with policies and more to do with folks that are increasingly hard to manipulate and blackmail. Thiscertainly doesn't apply to Trump's first administration, which was a disaster, but it was a disaster because he really didn't expect to win, and completely underestimated the swamp. As a result, he hastily put together a first administration of folks that had ulterior motives or was compromised.
At this point, Trump is probably the most vetted president in modern times. They have literally done everything possible to try and take him down. Yes, he's had his fair share of indiscretions and he absolutely is a flawed human, but none of his legitimate indiscretions were enough to take him out that there have now been many unhinged efforts to manufacture scandal to take him out because he represents such a threat to the deep state.
One reason Trump has largely been able to avoid this stuff is because he learned first hand how the coercion and blackmail machine functioned very early in his career with his exposure to Roy Cohn and the Blue Suite scandal at the Plaza Hotel. His behavior certainly hasn't been beyond reproach (far from it), but at this point, it's safe to say that he's not nearly as compromised as the Clinton's, the Bush's and the Biden's have proven to be.
While I'm not keen on many of his cabinet picks, there are quite a few folks in there that have already had their dirty laundry aired, and while it wasn't always pretty, it also wasn't career ending. What you're left with are folks that have seen how the coercion and blackmail and scandal operating machine works and are on a mission to destroy it. This time around, more of the cabinet picks appear to be far less compromised than previous administrations including Trump's first administration.
Basically, my take is that this is the first administration in my lifetime that has some leeway to break from from the orbit of blackmail and coercion that has shaped policy since Kennedy was assassinated.
This is how collusion happens between the government (regulators, prosecutors, politicians, etc) and the corporate (media personalities, super wealthy, powerful attorneys, think tanks, etc). Revolving door, conflicts of interest, etc--these can't be solved in the modern form of government.
I'm not sure there is a modern form of government that can solve the problem we have. If a non-trivial quantity of your leaders (elected or appointed) are being coerced and blackmailed, there's not really a solution. Maybe in the past, a monarch could have their blackmailer and associates put to death, but there's not really a solution for a nation under blackmail. You certainly won't be able to have a form of government with a functional justice system with concepts like innocent until proven guilty and due process. I can't think of a way for a leader to remain beholden to the will of the people, if there is no mechanism to swiftly deal with blackmail, when the price is to go against the will of the people. Such a mechanism would be incompatible with the modern tenets of justice.
"Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion, Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." — John Adams, October 11, 1798.
I don't remember the interview, but there was an interview in the second have of 2024 with Peter Thiel where he basically alludes to the fact that we're largely operating with institutions today that are basically a club where admittance is granted on the basis of being compromised. Basically, this reeks of the adage attributed to Lenin "Trust is good. Control is better".
As greed and avarice and numerous vices become more common, the pool of blackmailable people to sponsor to a position of power only grows. There was a reason, institutions like the FBI and CIA used to strongly prefer hiring Mormons, who did not drink and were very unlikely to partake in adultery or other frowned up sexual proclivities.
For the most part, I would not be surprised if getting the financial support to run for office in many parts of the country are largely predicated on the whether or not the financial backers underwriting your campaign feel confident they can control you. It's probably not enough to trust a politician for many financiers of politicians. They need to know they can control before they write a check.
This is why we have so few politicians of any integrity like Thomas Massie. Even he has a massive target on his back, with lots of money pouring in to support his opponents. I can imagine that someone like Thomas Massie could only ever win in a state that is still largely constituted of the types of people of which John Adams wrote. A politician with any integrity would be very unlikely to ever win in states like California, New York or Illinois.
The fact that the only people arrested in the Epstein scandal have been Epstein and Maxwell, pretty much speaks volumes about how out how our government is being run. There is little to no accountability (for government officials or executives in corporations) apart from a token person going to jail now and again. We have a system of government and institutions actively protecting criminals.
I agree with your diagnosis of the problems with American society, particularly the 'high trust' vs 'low trust' line of thought. I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.
Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism. I think that explains the H1b abuses we both deplore, the social balkanization, and also the very similar cultural, economic, and governance breakdowns simultaneously appearing in other countries across the "western/liberal" world.
I'm not saying that to spark further argument, just as prelude to: I hope you're right. If the way to re-forming a high-trust society and curing what we agree ails us is as simple as the American right posits then I will happily eat crow over the next four or eight or whatever years. That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.
I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next? I believe that's what created the mid-twentieth century cultural foundations which we'd both like to reconstruct.