It is absolutely the fault of the elites. Blaming the people who pointed out their faults instead of themselves for ignoring every single signal that they are wrong will lead to more of the same for them, which is more maga and dissolution of institutions. And if they cant go through that little bit of introspection then they absolutely deserve it.
Seriously, we live in the age of social media. The elites could shit out any opinion that they have and see the reaction to it and calibrate accordingly. Instead of taking any notes of the popular opinion they chose to bury their heads in the sand and try to cancel, ban, censor, and in some countries imprison any opinion which disagreed with theirs.
The biggest example of elite inability was the whole 'Biden is perfectly mentally capable' bullshit they tried to pull off. They had years of data on his mental deterioration, many of them must have seen it first hand, and people were absolutely screaming about it. How did they think they were going to pull it off? Eventually the public was going to see it. They could have easily done something about this and 100 other issues that would have guaranteed they would win over Trump. The only explanation is that these people are incompetent cowards, which is not who you want running the country.
There is no singular, unified "they." Writing off "the elite" broadly – hundreds of thousands of people across thousands of institutions doing many different things in fields from science to policy to education to media – because of individual stories of individual failure is a populist misconception.
Biden denialism was a major failure, but a failure of a specific group of people in a specific context. Some people in elite roles (like people at all levels of society) are *always* failing, at every point in history. This isn't a new or unique problem, but we haven't always responded to individual failures by concluding "it's clearly all broken, we must burn it all down!" I don't think that obscuring, denying, or censoring discussion of inevitable failure is any kind of solution, but it seems dangerous to have a media, cultural, and memetic environment that drives so many people to conclude from any individual failure that everything is now uniquely broken and irredeemable in a broad, universal, and systemic way, exactly as your comment reflects.
At the same time, claiming that no number of individual failures can indicate a systemic problem, or that systemic problems are impossible to identify because systems are simply "collections of individuals, and no individual necessarily reflects the system" is also a conceptual failure.
You need to actually do the hard work to try to determine systemic issues WITHOUT lapsing into either "the elites are a hivemind, here are their stupid thoughts" OR "that's just an individual instance, you can't make any judgement based on one datapoint alone [repeat for all datapoints]".
The current media environment means you'll be able to collect a number of datapoints to support literally any conclusion, which makes it hard, but you need to do the best you can
The way I look at that issue is it’s amazing how well Biden ran the country given how supposedly demented he was and badly Trump is for a guy with great energy and all the tech geniuses at his disposal (literally?).
Biden being semi incapacitated was a good thing in that it allowed the Democratic Establishment to run the White House. At least we got more or less status quo Dem leadership and a decent economy. Biden was weak enough the GOP could also checkmate him a lot of the time. Trump was tolerable when the GOP and elites could still contain him 1st term but now his complete narcissism and poor judgement in selecting personnel is on full display.
This mentality and the responses to it are why the left got knocked on its ass last fall and also why it's a good thing, in the long run, that this outcome occurred.
Biden wasn't running anything and he wasn't "supposedly demented," he was obviously diminished, before he was elected and went downhill from there. It was horrifying that Biden was allowed to remain in office after his debate debacle. It's mind boggling that elites had been totally fine with 4 more years of having a brain-dead puppet in the White House, just a few months before the election.
The party of " Protect Our Democracy" was totally okay with having unelected Democratic Party apparatchiks running the executive branch. This level of obtuse, needed a strong rebuke, it could not be repaired by continued success. In truth, many will learn nothing from this defeat, but some will and that's necessary progress.
I think at some level the Blue Tribe is uncomfortable discussing mental capability. Both at a personal and political level it is an awkward thing to bring up.
The Biden thing was an arrogant, stupid political strategy by a group of people who wanted to stay in power, and it deserves to be criticized as such. But guess what, that's politics - you could say the same about Signal Pete Hegseth and his gang flouting opsec, or all the Republicans who went along with Trump's unhinged rants about Haitian immigrants eating pets, or George Bush's crew making up stories about WMD in Iraq (fwiw, they were very much the "populist" side 20 yrs ago) ...or hell, even Nixon and Watergate.
If this is the thrust of the argument fair enough, I'm on board, but it's just the standard critique of politicians of all stripes, I don't see what railing against "the elite", as if they are some distinct political class, adds to it.
Social media ceased to be a barometer of the public mood after the Arab Spring, when every authoritarian regime on the planet realised that pumping out bots to “influence” sentiment and force their desired views to trend was an effective way to culture jam the West. Close your eyes and pretend you’re listening to “the people” if you like - you’re a useful tool for foreign elites.
"As for the Trump presidency itself, I have been vocal about some stuff I think is bad, but I think it is too early to tell what the exact impact will be long term."
I mean, really. Three months in and he's broken any trust in America as a safe investment, a defense partner, a research community, a tourism destination, or even just somewhere where habeas corpus is a meaningful proposition.
What the hell are you expecting in the next 45 months that might undo the damage already wrought?
Right, except so far the Supreme Court has immunized the president from criminal charges, slow walked cases against him, and refused to rule against Trump in anything other than minor procedural grounds while approving of his substantive actions. These are not the actions of a muscular Court that's going to defend the rule of law.
Additionally I want to point something out you're missing from your analysis and that Scott only lightly addresses in his piece. Which is that plenty of people saw this coming. For years, people all over the political spectrum said "hey, Trump has no principles other than that of a narcissistic bully and fundamentally doesn't believe in the rule of law. He has surrounded himself by people who gleefully lie about anything as long as it suits their purposes, and appear to have no principles beyond the gathering of power or destruction of the government. This will be a disaster." And the centrist edglords consistently ignored the Cassandras, instead choosing to harp on smug annoying leftists in academia. So yeah, as far as policies and beliefs go I think the centrist edglords were probably all correct. But as far as the consequences of those policies go, the dramatic screaming liberals were also entirely right. And quite frankly I don't give a shit about how a trans-womans grip strength compares to a cis-womans or whatever it is you think the leftist elites were so desperately wrong about. The centrist edglords were warned about the consequences, ignored them, and now are trying to pretend there was no way to see this coming. Feel free to blame all the ridiculous woke liberals for their stupid beliefs, but have the decency to acknowledge that the centrist edglords spent years critiquing firefighters while the Republicans happily ran through the house pouring gas and playing with matches.
Sure, I'm not saying you did. But we're talking about Scott and Twilight of the Edgelords, where Beroe loosely stands in for Scott and his opinions. And the consistent theme throughout the piece is that Beroe believes that the liberal establishment was so anti-science and free speech that they had to be stood against. That sure, the populist right was frothing at the mouth to lock people up for protected speech and ban vaccines, but that on a long enough time frame establishment liberals would probably have been worse. That's not me being uncharitable, Beroe makes that argument like 6 paragraphs in. Personally, I think spending your time and effort rightfully criticizing the stupid aqueduct policies of the later Roman Empire is totally fine and often worthwhile, but if you're doing it while the Visigoths are battering down the gates you have a fundamentally misplaced set of priorities.
Fair, it was inapt metaphor picked for evocative imagery over accuracy. But blaming right wing backlash on leftist excesses is a fundamental misreading of the dynamic. The ACA was modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan that had been successfully implemented by Republican governor Mitt Romney. But as soon as Democrats tried to implement it all the Republicans started screaming about government death panels and tyranny. Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public-private partnership under insane conditions that saved countless American lives. But Trump suddenly decided the pandemic wasn't real, so his own massively success program was thrown under the bus and now the NIH is gutted and the health secretary is trying to cure measles with vitamin A.
What's the proper lesson to take from this? I don't think the lesson is that if only establishment leftists has been more reasonable and implemented all of the centrist policy positions we wouldn't be here. I think the lesson is that it doesn't matter what you do, the conservatives will be against it. If the Democratic party pivoted tomorrow and put Richard Hanania in charge the right would still be screaming about insane leftists wanting to sell your children as gay child brides to Hamas. I'm not even joking, I had a conversation a week ago with a woman who voted for Trump because she thought Harris wanted to import Hamas into her rural Colorado town to rape her and her daughter. What establishment liberal policy do you think is to blame for that position?
Look, I'm a Libertarian who was a sociology major in college. I was surrounded by living stereotypes of smug, ignorant, woke assholes in every single class. But you could at least argue policy with them, in the last election the RNC's official policy platform was "whatever Trump wants". Populism is not a response to establishment policies, populism is a middle finger to everything people think is currently wrong with the world. And if you can't trust the Republicans to support their own policies when the establishment enacts them, then arguing that a different policy would have a different outcome is a fundamental misreading of what's happening.
Trump was elected in 2016. Robin D'Angelo's "White Fragility" was published in 2018, Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" was published in 2019. Black Lives Matter protests (mostly) happened in 2020. That Holden Thorpe tweet was from 2023. This theme can be built out more, but my point is this: All of the supposedly intolerable idpol excesses of liberal elites took place *after* Trump was elected the first time. Trump was not a product of some out-of-touch liberal elitism; if anything, the out-of-touch liberal elitism was an immune response to an invasive and malignant organism.
Trump won against Hilary Clinton by being a famous carnival barker who skewered conservative pieties while facing off against a ludicrously unpopular candidate. He then lost to Joe Biden because he was a famous carnival barker who got 1M Americans killed during COVID and people took his continued political career seriously enough to come out to vote against him. He then won in 2024 by not being the president who oversaw the 2021-2022 inflationary boom—which is basically the only explanation you need when you look at global post-COVID political developments.
All of which is to say, you can paint a very clear and convincing picture of the Donald Trump phenomenon—and even lower-tier actors like Ron Desantis—without giving a whiff of credibility or consideration to the idea that it was a reaction to something liberals were doing.
John Tester and Mike Sides' book "Identity Crisis" demonstrates pretty convincingly that the election of Barack Obama cracked the minds of the Republican Party and American conservatives. This was as much an elite conservative phenomenon as it was a normie conservative phenomenon. The subsequent election of Donald Trump was the product of that. COVID finished the job and broke the rest of American conservatism's thin hold on reality and any moral commitments. You don't need anger at diversity statements or DEI trainings or anything of the sort to explain what happened.
The Visigoths weren't created by the bad aqueducts. The Visigoths were created by a ravenous hatred of Barack Obama.
"Additionally I want to point something out you're missing from your analysis and that Scott only lightly addresses in his piece. Which is that plenty of people saw this coming. For years, people all over the political spectrum said "hey, Trump has no principles other than that of a narcissistic bully and fundamentally doesn't believe in the rule of law. He has surrounded himself by people who gleefully lie about anything as long as it suits their purposes, and appear to have no principles beyond the gathering of power or destruction of the government. This will be a disaster." And the centrist edglords consistently ignored the Cassandras, instead choosing to harp on smug annoying leftists in academia. So yeah, as far as policies and beliefs go I think the centrist edglords were probably all correct. But as far as the consequences of those policies go, the dramatic screaming liberals were also entirely right."
I'm confused. People "saw this coming"? You mean liberals saw Trump coming? Yes, many "edgelords" (I think that moniker is dumb, but I guess it's what we've got) saw it too. It's part of the reason we cajoled and criticized and lambasted the elite leadership! Yes, we were "warned" that our dissent from the elite orthodoxy was giving aid and cover to our enemies, but this smacks of simply authoritarian control to me. If we hadn't been critical, the populists would have been just as powerful. They were not responding to edgelord criticisms of elites; they were responding to elites themselves! Instead, the elites attempted to muzzle the edgelords because our arguments suggested that the elites had lost their way, that they were less moral and less correct they they thought themselves. Rather than engage with edgelords, they strove to shut them up, in part by saying that we were empowering populists.
And those are simply the pragmatic concerns. By the lights of our principles, there was no responsible way *not* to dissent. Authoritarian exercise of power is authoritarian exercise of power and that is anathema.
Others have sort of pointed this out already, but there are two problems with your argument:
1) The premise is just wrong. Scott wrote an essay endorsing "anyone but Trump" three times! I don't know what more you'd want him to do, but he probably did that too. This is the opposite of ignoring the Cassandras; he *was* one of them. Excepting Hanania, I'm pretty sure that's broadly true of edgelordism 2015-2025.
2) The way liberals/leftists went about criticizing Trump might as well have been an endorsement. If you really want voters to turn away from a candidate, you don't yell at and scold his supporters about how uniquely evil he is and so they simply have to surrender and vote for the unmodified guy you want! That, pragmatically, does not work, and the reason it doesn't is because the voter is not as stupid as you seem to think: he can at least recognize an obvious trap when he sees it.
Instead, what you must do is yell at *the other side*, the ones you want to win, about how uniquely evil this guy is and therefore they must throw all their shitty policies that are turning voters into the arms of a psycho overboard as quickly as possible. I admit this one has a low probability of working too, but at least it has *some* probability of working.
Well, at least some "centrist edgelords" were criticizing politicians for paying attention to "annoying leftists in academia" But more important, all of the valid criticism of the Biden administration (better said, the Warren-Sanders Administration) -- too high deficits, failure to reform taxes to raise revenue, trade restrictions (outside of a few areas of Chinese exports), failure to reform immigration to attract more high-skilled immigrants -- are even stronger crcism of the Trump prospective and now actual program.
How does that *reverse* the damage done? At best it prevents further damage from being done. The supreme court can't even get the presidency to bring back ONE GUY from El Salvador, who is there illegally by all accounts of the facts.
I suspect this is the true problem with centrists: an overcorrection for the hysteria of extremists by not being appropriately hysterical.
The Trump administration has been shocking. Its erratic economic policies will be damaging, and the actions they've taken against Green card holders have been truly awful.
But your comment lacks historical perspective. The US has been just as bad, and sometimes worse, at many points in our history. Recall Korematsu, or the abuses undertaken in the name of the global war on terror. Our government has broken the trust of the world, our allies, and even its own citizens many times in the past. But it's also rebuilt it, every time. That won't just happen, and may not even start in the next forty-five months, but there's no reason to think it's impossible, or even very hard.
Nothing is impossible and noting is to be gained by thinking recovery is, but really, the degree of destruction and in just 3 months is really unprecedented.
"The degree of destruction and in just 3 months is really unprecedented".
The pace, yes, but I think that's the whole of it. It's hard to make a definitive case because history offers few clear comps.
What I really want to argue is that the administration has not committed a pivotal act, something that changes everything irrevocably (such as, say Hiroshima). Trump has yet to burn the ships. And so, the future is an open question.
The tariffs alone are irrevocable. The only way trade resumes with China now is by giving up something as a gift to them, like destroying the CHIPS act, which leads to the irrevocable situation of China becoming the dominant superpower. Or the Tariffs stay in place, in which case they have effectively destroyed US-Chinese trade. That's not to mention the 10% applied to every other country on earth. This is a pivotal moment for the US.
Yea, what's weird is that Dubya shocked and turned off Europeans too - not this bad, admittedly, but we couldn't compare it to now, then - but now that contingent of conservative is *part* of the Euro crowd shocked by Trump.
The war on terror alienated absolutely no one except the few countries and people who centrists believe to be too extreme. Hell, American allies *participated* in the war on terror--with glee, even!
This is simply false. The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alone damaged our standing for a long time, in many ways. As much as I despise the administration's conduct towards green card holders (and Abrego Garcia), this is nothing compared to the shock felt in the US and across the world when Sixty Minutes aired their special on Guantanamo (followed shortly by Seymour Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker).
Beyond that, our open embrace of electronic surveillance, secret courts, and extraordinary rendition substantively altered diplomatic relations.
As I said farther up, your point of view lacks any sense of history. We should fight specific Trump administration actions which are bad enough they don't need hyperbole to justify opposition.
You accuse me of having some hyperbolic interpretation of history, but what does "damage our standing for a long time" mean precisely? How was it worse than the current administration for Americans?
Yes, the words we're using are imprecise. The OP wrote "he's broken any trust in America as a safe investment, a defense partner, a research community, a tourism destination, or even just somewhere where habeas corpus is a meaningful proposition."
Those are terms that don't have obvious metrics, much less a consensus about what they mean. I originally commented to inject some sense of proportion into the discussion, even though I don't have all the answers. I do, however, know that people forget history, and anyone that has lived through the war on terror as an adult with recognize a lot of this rhetoric. (To say nothing of capital-H-history.)
Your level of engagement has been extremely weak so far. I can take some lumps and don't mind disagreement but unless you offer more clarity, demonstrate you have a rudimentary theory of my mind, or show a scrap of imagination, I'm done with this discussion.
Nonsense, you can easily measure tourism, research output and researcher count, court appeals and appeal outcomes, investment stability, and defense spending and mission readiness. I wouldn't say it's clear at this point that all of these are down, but you can clearly measure literally all of them.
All I asked why the war on terror is worse than the current administration in terms of alliance degradation, and then I asked a follow up question. This, apparently, is "less than rudimentary theory of mind".
I have to say I also recoiled at that statement but I did read the whole thing.
My thoughts are along the lines of:
Criticizing liberal elites and setting up a permission structure for and contributing money to Tr, M and the rest of the scumbags are two different things with the former being fine and necessary.
Just so I don't stay stuck in my bubble, could you please give examples of what the previous administration did that's equivalent to kidnapping innocent people off the streets, rendering them to El Salvador and, thus far, refusing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling to repatriate them?
Or hitting supposed allies with poorly calculated tariffs that left Iran in a better position than Israel?
Your phrasings make clear that it's a waste of time to try to talk you out of your delusions, but for the sake of setting the record straight, we might start with the years-long imprisonments of people who protest near abortion clinics, the arresting of many people over "J6" and detaining them for years without trials (some of whom weren't even on site and many of whom broke no laws), and your European counterparts imposing years-long prison sentences on sexual assault victims who dare to talk about their experiences on social media.
As for Abrego Garcia, a low-information person might be forgiven for believing that he wasn't in the country illegally given the media's dance around that fact in all of its coverage. It's absurd that deportation cases are considering the criminal's "best interest" - shall we ask whether it's in a bank robber's best interest to give the money back? But of course, you are left-wing people, and that means that you know as well as anyone that you can't win an honest argument, so here you are calling him an "innocent person", or even incorrectly calling him a "citizen".
Your party's lies and incompetence allowed the Taliban to waltz into Kabul, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe for millions of people. You invited the Russians to invade Ukraine, then claimed that the problem will be solved by shoveling a few more billion US tax dollars over there. You even provoked October 7 by making it crystal clear to Hamas that if they butchered enough civilians to force Israel to respond, they could turn the deluded West against Israel.
I'm not nearly naive enough to think that you'll ever comprehend - let alone take responsibility for - the everyday horrors that your partisanship hath wrought. You only want to hate the people who are stuck cleaning up your messes.
But back to where we started: You genuinely don't comprehend the fact that your perspective is a minority one. You think the whole world (or at least everyone who matters) agrees with you. That is why your partisanship continues to have horrible predictive power. You lie to yourselves far more than to anyone else.
I honestly don't know enough about the consequences of tariffs etc to comment and I felt like maybe I'm downplaying things that shouldn't be downplayed.
Honestly, writing from the UK, it does feel like you are downplaying a lot that shouldn't be downplayed. It is hard to overstate the shock and dismay caused since January, *even amongst those previously pretty positive about Trump*. Gerard Baker, for example, writing in Rupert Murdoch's The [London] Times is appaled and bewildered at America's foreign and economic policies.
I cannot overstate how badly being lectured by the Vice-President on "free speech" as you openly side with a murderous dictator over an invaded democracy, snatch innocent people from the streets and render them to an El Salvador concentration camp, or deport students for writing op-eds has gone down. You then engaged on a chaotic programme of ripping up the global trading order patiently built since at least 1980, leading at one point to Iran having better trading terms than Israel, and uninhabited islands whose only inhabitants are penguins being slapped with tariffs because you don't understand your own data.
To be honest, whilst you are free to write whatever you want, a piece describing how, actually, this is the fault of the people who said it would be bad and should be avoided feels at best like a frog writing about how annoying those people who said getting in the saucepan with this lovely warm water would be unwise were, and at worst like wilful deflection. Sorry.
I guess I am just used to having edits documented. I find it helpful to see how a piece of writing has evolved, though agree excessive notation can needlessly disrupt readability.
Really like the case you build for elite self-repair over populist collapse.
Re: your optimism: I suspect the 2026 midterms will be an early test. If the MAGA wing gets rolled by centrists (from either party), it signals a recalibration is happening. If not, it may suggest the edgelords didn’t break the system. Rather they just underestimated how broken it already was.
I am not sure that she is arguing for "elite self-repair." I think that she is arguing for criticizing the elites when they are incorrect and not worrying that doing so might cause a populist backlash against them.
And I do not believe that centrists can prosper in either party for reasons that I outline in this article:
I hate the term 'populism', I just don't think it's all that useful. It makes it sounds like the problem with certain policies is that they're popular, which is obviously not it.
The key feature that's bad about what we call "populism" is its illiberalism. The sales pitch of the "populist" is that a devotion to principles, rules or norms is getting in the way of solving some urgent problem. The populist promises to get the problem solved no matter what. The argument against this approach is vague, abstract, far-mode thinking -- which is why the argument against it is usually 'elite' or 'unpopular'.
We don't call "We can't afford to worry about a commitment to the truth" populist, but it's bad for the same reasons. If we embrace illiberal solutions to some crisis, we're unlikely to be in a better position at the end of it.
The 'elites' bent their principles a lot to get through the crisis of the 2020 election. But it's not like they then cleaned house once that was how they'd won. There was no circling back around and saying, "Yes we all went along with the idea that opposing illegal immigration was racist, but we really should do something about this". Instead there was a doubling down on the same approach, with really no debate within the centre/left, putting us in an even worse position in 2024.
If we refuse to critique 'our own side' because we need to hold off even worse ideas, what's going to make the ideas on our side easier to defend in future? We're just going to get further into debt.
So I really don't think we should credit the argument that it was the 'edgelords' who were at fault. What we needed was more of that medicine sooner.
I see a lot of people writing "sure, go ahead and criticize the left / expert consensus, but only if you balance it with criticisms of Trump."
Earlier this year, a commenter on Slow Boring wrote exactly that: "I think it’s fine to complain about left of center people, spending more time doing that than attacking the right or suggesting that they’re anywhere near as bad as Trump is, in fact, morally bad, and if you do it, you deserve to be socially sanctioned." Incredibly, we went from "Trump is evil" to "voting for Trump is evil" to "not talking 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 about Trump's badness is evil."
This is, among many other things, a deeply defective theory of persuasion.
I suspect that no one - probably literally zero people - would have voted for Harris instead of Trump if you or Scott had spent 10% more time writing about how bad MAGA is, much less a larger amount. Instead, they would have stopped reading you, especially if they were the kind of rote denunciations that already abound on the internet.
By contrast, I've been hanging on to the center-left by a thread for a decade. One of the main things that has kept me here is the existence of sane center/center-left voices that don't waste my time with pointless throat-clearing. To be fair, MAGA and Trump have played a major role in keeping me on-side, but I hardly need writers to tell me how bad they are (though I appreciate it when you have something insightfully negative to say about them).
A lot of this is contingent on *when* the persuasion is taking place. Are we in campaign season and our choices are binary, or are we in policy season where good arguments can influence policymakers?
Matt Yglesias made the observation last year that the Free Press wields its influence in part by what it chooses to cover. (He wrote this in admiration, not a backdoor way to call them fascists.) Right now the GOP is trying to wipe out huge chunks of Medicaid, something that was utterly predictable during the campaign. This is a health care issue that affects millions of people on a day to day basis. But the Free Press's coverage of health care is focused on MAHA adjacent stuff like microplastics and gender affirming care.
Your bleeding heart can want more Medicaid spending all you want, but a) the country can’t afford it, and b) the country can’t afford it, and c) it contributes to the dysfunction of the current healthcare system, includes a bunch of waste and fraud, and contributes to why healthcare’s prices are so high. The incentives are all wrong.
The country can’t afford Trump. He has already ruined the economy and he is going to explode the deficit. When we talk about Medicaid the questions shouldn’t be “can we afford it” but “how can we afford it and keep costs low enough”? Everyone deserves some healthcare.
There is a contingent of edgelord-adjacent media that likes to talk about cultural issues they align with Trump on while ignoring other aspects of Trump. Tariffs and health care are good examples of that.
No, the article is about "edgelord's" share of the blame for Trump being elected. Which frankly is just a silly thing to be discussing, period.
Though I understand why some center-leftists and anti-Trump centrists think said conversation might be worthwhile, rather than focus on the actual issue (which is Dem policies, and to a lesser extent Dem narratives above and beyond those policies, all moving hard to the left).
Yes, I get from your center-left reading list that there are things about center-right, libertarian and right writers you don't like (probably most things that aren't anti-Trump center right).
Because of course NO ONE in the media talks about cultural issues where they *don't* align with Trump, so clearly that's a space TFP needs to fill...
a) There is a dearth of virtue / character in the zone where elite human capital meets the public sphere. If we graphed vice and virtue (y) from Left to Right (x) we'd likely see a bi-modal distribution for the former and a normal distribution for the latter. That Scott wants to look himself in the mirror (despite not being the problem) is virtuous.
There are too many smart, accomplished people in public facing academia and journalism / social media that destroy any good-will / coalition building by simultaneously offering something proximate to wisdom but delivered in a petty, antagonistic, manipulative (emphasis on the last) manner. This is the mark of the insecure seeking status and not that of a leader(s).
b) While it may be true that 'elites are axiomatically more fit to rule,' the pool of elites can't only come from universities, tech, etc. You mention something important about 'those with ability to raise the status of others:' Going a step further, the accomplished could do more in the recruitment of talent outside of universities (in particular). My belief / simple heuristic is that too many elites today are selected by the feminine mechanism (a pool of suitor applicants seeking the collective's approval (e.g. universities) and too few from the masculine (the collective actively seeking talented individuals).
> My belief / simple heuristic is that too many elites today are selected by the feminine mechanism (a pool of suitor applicants seeking the collective's approval (e.g. universities) and too few from the masculine (the collective actively seeking talented individuals).
Aren't those masculine "actively seeking talents" the tech right? I mean, if you've founded and grown a company that's worth millions or billions, you've pretty much proved your talent and demonstrated a ton of agency, and a whole lot of them are college dropouts.
Haven't people always complained that money and businessmen have and demonstrate more power than most politicians?
Don't wait to be elevated by some outside elite, build a company, it's a surer way to power and status than a college degree or politics.
Yes, to a degree. But there are other domains with (other types of) talent, not just highly visible / highly profitable ones. Tech could be used as a template of sorts. I saw where Palantir recently announced a program to attract talent as an alternative to college (still an apply and be approved model, though).
Think about sports recruiting. How many talented young people eventually rose to the top or at least had a modicum of success that may have otherwise withered and died had some talent recruiter not been sent into the wild to find them and pull them into a system where they could potentially thrive.
The idea of making better elites is extremely old. For thousands of years political philosophy could be summed up as "how do we make better kings?" and what you're asking for here isn't different.
Let it go. The "elites" have never been elite; they have always sucked. 100 years ago the EHC consensus was that communism was a brilliant idea, that planned economies would be superior to capitalism and that Stalin wasn't so bad really. The communists claimed to fight for the working class but it was an endless stream of shitty Ivy League/Oxbridge Elite Human Capital who were so easily brainwashed by nonsense that they leaked sensitive documents to the Soviets, thinking they were making the world a better place by doing so.
In hindsight, we can see how wrong they were. But also in foresight! People like Bakunin were pointing out how stupid Marxism was right from the moment Marx first started writing. Then in the 21st century the elites went all-in on Marxism v2 despite it being even more obviously stupid a second time around.
Go back in time further and the elites don't get smarter. They have always been in hock to dumb ideas.
The fix for all this isn't to try and selectively breed a more elite kind of human. It's to recognize that "elite" almost invariably only has meaning in the context of government and those who try to influence that government. Shrink the government to its core requirements, let people figure out the rest by themselves and suddenly the need for a better elite is much less pressing, or gone entirely. And that's actually a practical project, whereas getting academics to stop cheating isn't.
Sure they have always been self-interested and flawed.
But the post-WWII throug about 2005 U.S. elites seemed to govern “well enough”, if not actually “well”.
But what they’ve done the last 17 years, and especially their lawfare against Trump and how they governed from 2020-2024, is beyond indefensible.
The way to do it is - even if we’re gonna have some welfare and old-age transfers, otherwise bring things back towards the founding, and get the government to spend less and do less.
Indeed. Many of the issues we have now are rooted in the post-WW2 to 2005 era consensus, so I'd disagree that they governed well enough. They set up a lot of very deep rooted cultural and policy problems that will take a long time to unwind, if it ever happens at all.
For instance, the relentless growth of the government I'm criticizing here was largely a post-war phenomenon.
Perhaps I should substitute “far less badly” for “well enough”?
And imo the other factor is the bad elite policies back then seemed more actually well-intentioned and less purely self-serving and/or virtue signaling than today’s.
Though of course no doubt it is a spectrum.
But the spectrum seems clearly a lot darker in more recent years.
I never used to believe in claims of repetition of the fall of the Holy Roman empire.
The goal should be to reform the elites. Our elites are not less intelligent or less competent than previous eras. Instead, so many of them derive their social status and moral identity from Left-of-Center ideology that conflict with material reality, and this leads to dysfunctional behavior.
I do not believe, however, that convincing them intellectually is enough.
Nor is this anything new. Elites have always tried to expropriate the gains of material progress from the masses to use it for their own self-interest and then rationalizing it through their unique value system.
The solution, I believe, is transparent non-violent transparent competition between elites rather than the current practice of federal government subsidies via the following:
1) Freedom of speech, particularly on social media. Social media will only get more important as a means of communication, and there have been clear attempts by the federal government to restrict freedom of speech on those platforms.
If we lose freedom of speech, all our other rights are in much greater danger.
2) Transparency - Soft Totalitarianism thrives in secrecy. The more the American people know about what is going on within bureaucracies, the easier it is for us to fight back.
3) Merit-based hiring, firing, and promotions - The key to smuggling activists into public and private bureaucracies are the policies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This undermines the proper functioning of all our institutions and undermines their legitimacy. Worse, it is blatant racial and gender discrimination.
4) Radical reductions in government, corporate, and non-profit bureaucracies - Soft Totalitarians thrive in bureaucracies. The smaller the bureaucracy, the less likely that Soft Totalitarians impose their will slowly by bureaucratic rules.
5) Decentralization - The Founders established the US Constitution on the principle of Federalism, but we have gotten away from it in the last century. We need a massive shift of domestic powers away from the federal government and towards the state and local governments.
6) Competition between institutions - Competition forces organizes to focus on results. And if free citizens get to choose which institutions to vote for, work within, buy from, invest in, and donate to, then a large portion of those results flow to the masses.
7) Elimination of government subsidies - Government subsidies isolate organizations from competition, so they tend to produce bad results.
8) Creation of new institutions based on the above principles to compete with ideologically captured institutions.
> if anyone is to actually be assigned indirect responsibility for future negative consequences
This is an awkward framing. Is there a particular reason for it?
Obviously the rise of the current moment is multicausal. The bad behavior patterns that took hold among cultural elites are one cause. The appeasement and enabling of populists by the "edgelords" are another cause. (And a third major cause is of course simply the timing of inflation. And a fourth major cause is Biden refusing to bow out until it was too late for his replacement to run a full campaign.) Not all causes are equal; some are obviously bigger than others. But everyone who contributed to our current bad outcomes deserves some share of the blame, and ought learn a suitable lesson about what they themselves could have done better.
A position like "Other people were more at fault than my side was, therefore I will learn no lesson" is nonsensical moral reasoning, or in some cases corrupt moral reasoning. So to the extent you think that position is a fair interpretation of this post, it's a call for reconsidering the approach.
Agreed, “should edgelords accept some of the blame” is kind of a clumsy clickbait-y way of posing the question and I feel like Ruxandra got a bit too anchored on/triggered by this framing, to the detriment of this post
I think inflation and other factors were definitely important, but to the extent that culture or anti elite sentiment played a role, I'm saying the blame shouldn't be w/ the ppl who (reasonably) pointed out some things were wrong. If you think it's mostly about economics or non cultural matters or so then neither edgelords nor elites are to blame. I mean elites could be blamed to the extent that they caused the economic consequences
Scott's article is paywalled so I don't know whether that's a fair summary of his point, but I 100% agree w/ you that you're entirely within your rights to criticize the wokeness, etc you think is wrong - I agree w/ you on a lot of it. But also...my gut feel is that you're strawmanning a bit.
To try to steelman his case - I reread your post and I think your theory of how the "elite establishment" is the primary root cause of all social change is just wrong. Also I don't see why you think they have "higher responsibility than the rest of people" - I think people who supported Trump are plenty accountable for the consequences, whether or not they meet your definition of "elite". I think that's the real criticism of the "edgy centrists".
For one, I think you're pulling a bit of a motte-and-bailey, being mainly focused on liberal/progressive/woke actors (which, fair enough!) but also claiming you're really just addressing the elite establishment that has all the real power. It's a curious "elite" that includes the editor of Science but not Elon Musk, who has been spreading all manner of bullshit for years, or finance types, like Bill Ackman who arrogantly thought Trump was going to be great for the economy and is now lamely claiming no one could have seen his tariff disaster coming, or Fox News, or pretty much any Republican in government. I think all the terrible things. I think you're wrong that Hanania is "catastrophizing" or that all the terrible things you acknowledge have just been "unleashed on X" and aren't so bad b/c they'll eventually be confined to the gutters of society. (As Keynes said "in the long run we're all dead"). I think what you call populism is a social force, and moral culpability of its own and needs to be called out. It's not simply something that will disappear if we can just get those pesky liberal elite to stop being woke.
I'm sure you'll disagree with lots of that, and it's worthy of further debate, but I think that's the real knock on edgy centrist, not just "you can't criticize the wokes b/c it helps Trump"
I think the cultural elite was wrong in many ways, and woke isn't the best way to describe it. It's become a cliché. Scott is involved in criticizing the intellectual/ cultural elite. He's asking if he's responsible for Trump.
Until recently, Elon was simply a financial elite.
Maybe the switch to Trump has nothing to do with culture, in which case neither the old intellectual elite nor Scott are causal for Trump getting elected. But, if we assume there's a cultural component to this switch, I argue it's not Scott who's to be assigned a causal role.
Elon is becoming a cultural elite thru his ownership of X and explicit attempts to influence culture, which he's succeeding at, and ppl like Scott are criticizing him plenty. But he wasn't doing that in 2015 when Scott was writing abt the failures of intellectual elites.
Scott isn't a tech analyst or a financial analyst or whatever. He's a cultural commentator so the elites that are relevant and which he argued against were never Elon or the ppl making the US fiscal policy.
Obviously I can't speak for Ruxandra. And I think my views differ from hers quite a bit. But her instincts are correct. Because to me, the crux of the matter isn't a matter of moral culpability. It's a matter of the structural incentives.
Democracy is best-suited to a small, high-trust society. Like a bunch of friends who decide how to split a dinner bill. Decisions are made earnest because there's a shared sense of destiny and purpose. And they can keep each other accountable because they know each other personally. However, the US is neither small nor high-trust. Instead, it's multi-cultural [0] and multi-ethnic. And voters do not cast votes face-to-face, they vote secretly in a ballot box. The result is constant screeching and bickering. Despite this, decision-making has continually been centralized rather than decentralized over the course of the US's history. (Curious how "Democratic Agonism" is supposedly so wonderful, and yet "nitty-gritty politics" is so miserable, isn't it.)
So in order for the USG to protect its technical competence from the stupidity of its own voters, it developed the Deep State. Particularly under FDR. This is deeply undemocratic, because it's not actually accountable to the voters. But the USG has to maintain the facade of democracy anyway, because the written Constitution is so sacred. And it can maintain this facade easily, because "democracy at scale" = "faceless bureaucracy at scale", which allows the system to play hot-potato with accountability. Meanwhile, the Deep State is ruled by a meritocratic elite who don't actually practice Noblesse Oblige. Thus, the union exists in a state of tension of having to continually hide its true nature.
IIRC, Ruxandra brought up my favorite example of this under a separate post of Scott Alexander's, when she mentioned Bush Junior's invasion of Iraq. Bush lied about WMD's in order to justify protecting Aramco, royally fucked up the invasion of Kabul by presuming that the Iraqi military would defect in the name of LibRaL dEmOcRAcY, and then tried to stabilize the powervacuum by pouring trillions of dollars into "nation-building" a newly-agonistic failed-state, while telling the US footsoldiers that their high-level mission was to aimlessly wander around, and shoot back if necessary. At what point in this farce did our sacred democracy hold Bush Junior aCcOunTabLE for any of this? On one hand, I would have preferred a little honesty. But on the other hand, can Bush really be blamed for expecting the average voter to be too stupid to understand the geopolitical nuances of the petrodollar empire?
So when Ruxandra frames this in terms of "responsibility", it's not a tribal critique. Its a structural critique.
----
Unfortunately, nobody is willing to talk about any of these issues openly. Because who would criticize modern liberal democracy on a *structural* basis, except for a raging fascist? And since I mentioned "multi-ethnic" earlier, I'm probably a bigot too, which allows respectable liberal turbo-normies to conveniently ignore the less-savory parts of reality while the ship continues to sink. Thus: "hm... maybe the edgelords are on to something!?" E.g. Hanania recently said something like "Trump is leaning into white idpol. This is bad because historically, leaders who lean into idpol (like Trump!!!1!) are more comfortable with blatant grift/corruption." Not only do I think Hanania is largely correct about Trump leaning into white idpol, but the situation was entirely predictable. Moldbug said (back during the *Obama years*) that one of the reasons he started UR was because he was afraid of what would happen if normies continued to refuse to openly discuss race-relations. In this comment section, Geary Johansen makes a similar observation:
> You make a good point, although it's worth noting that although I was an admirer of Obama, he made a couple of huge mistakes in terms of reracializing America, specifically in relation to K-12 and policing.
Therefore, Ruxandra is absolutely right to deflect blame from the edgelords. Scott is looking at the desolation of Trump, and understandably looking for explanations. But to blame the edgelords (e.g. the pro-MAGA pepe shitposters on twitter) is to shoot the messenger, at best. (At worst, it's blaming the firefighters for causing an arson.) The fact that moldbug (and arguably, TLP) called this during the *Obama years* should clearly demonstrate that the problems have been in the pipeline for quite some time. And the libs (perhaps with the exception of Scott, who's at least TRYING to understand) are continuing to double-down on their virtuous ignorance. It's not enough to just go "eh... I think we all deserve a little bit of blame" so long as the *multiple* elephants in the room continue to be willfully ignored.
p.s. Biden's endorsement of Harris represented a deliberate middle-finger to Obama and the Democratic Party establishment. He was big mad because he wanted to run against Trump's first campaign, but Obama pushed him aside because it was "Hillary's turn". Which speaks to Ruxandra's observation about infighting among the elites.
[0] I'm specifically thinking of Albion's Seed. It carries quite a lot of explanatory power about the current state of the culture wars. Curiously, Americans don't care about their own history. Because Americans are not a serious people.
"Firstly, it feels like Scott has been reading a lot of Richard Hanania, whom I agree with on a lot of points, but who I also believe is catastrophizing the situation"
Idk If I agree with you on the rest or not, but I strongly agree with this sentence, and specifically the back half of the sentence.
I hope you get through to Richard. He used to be a LOT more interesting; now he is becoming a drag whom I usually seek to avoid.
I believe half of his posts are trolling in such a way that it reads as sincere leftist virtue signalling. He basically says the quiet parts out loud but with a pro leftist framing and people are like yes this isn't ridiculous at all
I don’t really agree that he’s dishonest. I think in his OCDness he really believes the crap he’s spouting now.
IMO he’s just very anti- MAGA and anti- the alt-right, likely because he was once a slightly racist alt-righter himself, and so he fixates on that point, and on the worst of those folks, at the expense of literally everything else.
So now he’s no longer the brilliant, usually interesting, occasionally infuriating writer he used to be.
Instead he’s just an emotional, ranting TDS-er - or really MADSer (MAGA/Alt-right Derangement Syndrome) who is wrong more often than right.
Great piece. Still, I feel you are being too kind to the elites, and I can't help a certain degree of schadenfreude, even if (as is usually the case) the ones who suffer the worst consequences aren't the worst culprits. Elites had plenty of warnings (Trump's first term!) to realize that their ridiculous leftist drifting, patrician and arrogant dismissal of the masses and doubling down on the wrong side of the 20/80 issues *had* to backfire some day. I am also more on the pessimistic side, though: while wisdom comes from suffering (Aeschylus), it still doesn't seem they have suffered enough, and I really doubt the Usual Suspects (Yglesias, Klein...) are going to turn the tables within the Dems.
On a side note: only EA and EA-adjacent people could pull off something like even theoretically and masochistically putting the blame on themselves for the excesses of populist right and populist left. And yet they never cease to amaze me.
Just as many interpreted the wave of Tumblr refugees to Twitter after the porn ban as a sudden uptick in “woke”, others have taken the breaking of 4chan containment for an increase in /poll sentiments. There is probably some truth in both observations, but exaggerated hugely by tribal migration. The Internet is a big place, and “extreme habits of discourse” correlates with “Lots of free time to shitpost”.
Do the elites here include the largest TV news network, the largest network of local TV channels, the richest man in the world, the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court super majority, Republican governors, congressmen, etc?
He's mostly been a cultural one, so when he refers to criticizing the elites, he mostly means cultural/ intellectual ones. To the extent that he is political, he is democrat, and many "centrist edgelords" are, including Nate silver.
Fox News is not influential among the cultural/ intellectual elite. They do have power, power that translates directly into influencing electoral outcomes. And Scott isn't a Republican.
As for "the richest man in the world", he's until recently been a financial elite again smth Scott isn't specialised in criticizing. Since he's become more involved in the cultural/ political arena, he's been criticized plenty by centrist edgelords for promoting certain narratives and so on. Just look at what Jesse singal tweets all day abt these ppl.
If Elon and other right wing tech ppl become prominent financial elites become cultural players, I expect Scott and their centrist edgelords to criticize them. The twilight of the edgelords is in itself an implicit criticism of them as cultural players.
lol I know right? There's a bit of a motte-and-bailey dynamic here where she seems to want to criticize liberal/progressive/woke stuff specifically (which is totally fair, you can do that! I agree with a fair amount of it) but also claim the mantle of "what I'm *really* doing is taking on the 'elite establishment' that runs society", which apparently includes the editor of Science but not Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, or any Republicans in govt.
First, are We're talking about different elites. Intellectual vs financial. With the latter being aspiring kinda sort of intellectual tho mainly political.
Secondly, nowhere did I opine on bill ackman/elon, this is not even relevant to the point of this essay. Scott's question was: "was our criticism of the existing intellectual elite responsible for populism?". And I explain why it's wrong to think that way and why intellectual elites need to be criticised. As a note, now that Elon has taken a more political elite role, Scott is criticizing him too, tho he has never focused on criticizing political actors, he has mostly criticised intellectual ones.
I don't even know where Elon/ bill ackman feature in this argument ?!?
This seems like a post-hoc distinction. The post contains several references to elites, establishment elites, elite consensus, etc. and the great responsibility elites have towards society. I didn't see anything in it explaining how this only applies to academic elites and not elites in business, politics, or other fields. Musk and Ackman have expressed very clear views about how they think society should be structured and are attempting to use their elite power and social status to move society in that direction. I don't see how claiming they are "aspiring kinda sort of intellectual" means they matter less than say Harvard professors. If you're concerned about the impact of elites on the health of society then I would say political elites matter far more than "intellectual elites".
Also I think the distinction is also not as wide as you make it out to be - JD Vance and Peter Thiel have law degrees from Yale and Stanford, for instance. Which "elite bucket" do you put them in?
I thought Hanania’s response was spot on that “the problem with the edgelords is that that they (we) did a poor job of weighing the risks of populism and flawed elites at this particular point in history.” I think your critiques of “elites” are fair game but “populism” is a political force in its own right, one that’s been part of American history and done plenty of damage from the downfall of Reconstruction to the civil rights era to George Bush (I mean, supporting the invasion of Iraq was the populist position 20 years ago!) If you’re going to comment on politics, at some point you need to face it on its own terms and not just use it as a bogeyman to claim that if only those elites would stop doing all the things that annoy you then all our political problems would disappear.
That you don’t understand that the problem is not the ”edgelords” as here, nor Trump, nor MAGA, but the *union* of Dem policy and Democratic narratives - and much more the former than the latter - is very sad.
Great article. I had read Scott's piece on this, and it really didn't sit well. I feel the mayhem of Trump and the dumb elite syndrome on the Left, are apples and oranges. Trump is currently a bad case of shingles. It will pass, most likely. The dumb elite syndrome on the other hand, is systemic, controlling the institutions of knowledge and creeping towards State surveillance.
For good reason, many swing voters made a perilous calculation on election day. Long before then I personally sought out public intellectuals in the FIRE/Heterodox space to see what really had to be done. A lot of well-intentioned flaming arrows were being flung towards the ivory tower elites, but no one brought the trebuchet. No one was talking coalition.
The intellectual contraction of the Left resulted in a historic decline in confidence in the sciences, news media, and academia; and that helped fuel the emergence of new academic institutions, alliances, independent news media, and networks of scientists and public intellectuals who champion open civil conversation in the pursuit of truth. A market analysis of this political shift would probably reveal a coalition force capable of reaching funders and impacting institutions if not elections. I would hope the future includes some consideration of this.
It is absolutely the fault of the elites. Blaming the people who pointed out their faults instead of themselves for ignoring every single signal that they are wrong will lead to more of the same for them, which is more maga and dissolution of institutions. And if they cant go through that little bit of introspection then they absolutely deserve it.
Seriously, we live in the age of social media. The elites could shit out any opinion that they have and see the reaction to it and calibrate accordingly. Instead of taking any notes of the popular opinion they chose to bury their heads in the sand and try to cancel, ban, censor, and in some countries imprison any opinion which disagreed with theirs.
The biggest example of elite inability was the whole 'Biden is perfectly mentally capable' bullshit they tried to pull off. They had years of data on his mental deterioration, many of them must have seen it first hand, and people were absolutely screaming about it. How did they think they were going to pull it off? Eventually the public was going to see it. They could have easily done something about this and 100 other issues that would have guaranteed they would win over Trump. The only explanation is that these people are incompetent cowards, which is not who you want running the country.
Yep
There is no singular, unified "they." Writing off "the elite" broadly – hundreds of thousands of people across thousands of institutions doing many different things in fields from science to policy to education to media – because of individual stories of individual failure is a populist misconception.
Biden denialism was a major failure, but a failure of a specific group of people in a specific context. Some people in elite roles (like people at all levels of society) are *always* failing, at every point in history. This isn't a new or unique problem, but we haven't always responded to individual failures by concluding "it's clearly all broken, we must burn it all down!" I don't think that obscuring, denying, or censoring discussion of inevitable failure is any kind of solution, but it seems dangerous to have a media, cultural, and memetic environment that drives so many people to conclude from any individual failure that everything is now uniquely broken and irredeemable in a broad, universal, and systemic way, exactly as your comment reflects.
At the same time, claiming that no number of individual failures can indicate a systemic problem, or that systemic problems are impossible to identify because systems are simply "collections of individuals, and no individual necessarily reflects the system" is also a conceptual failure.
You need to actually do the hard work to try to determine systemic issues WITHOUT lapsing into either "the elites are a hivemind, here are their stupid thoughts" OR "that's just an individual instance, you can't make any judgement based on one datapoint alone [repeat for all datapoints]".
The current media environment means you'll be able to collect a number of datapoints to support literally any conclusion, which makes it hard, but you need to do the best you can
The way I look at that issue is it’s amazing how well Biden ran the country given how supposedly demented he was and badly Trump is for a guy with great energy and all the tech geniuses at his disposal (literally?).
Biden being semi incapacitated was a good thing in that it allowed the Democratic Establishment to run the White House. At least we got more or less status quo Dem leadership and a decent economy. Biden was weak enough the GOP could also checkmate him a lot of the time. Trump was tolerable when the GOP and elites could still contain him 1st term but now his complete narcissism and poor judgement in selecting personnel is on full display.
The biggest difference I think is that Biden had the capacity, wisdom and character to know when and to whom to defer despite his slowing mind.
This mentality and the responses to it are why the left got knocked on its ass last fall and also why it's a good thing, in the long run, that this outcome occurred.
Biden wasn't running anything and he wasn't "supposedly demented," he was obviously diminished, before he was elected and went downhill from there. It was horrifying that Biden was allowed to remain in office after his debate debacle. It's mind boggling that elites had been totally fine with 4 more years of having a brain-dead puppet in the White House, just a few months before the election.
The party of " Protect Our Democracy" was totally okay with having unelected Democratic Party apparatchiks running the executive branch. This level of obtuse, needed a strong rebuke, it could not be repaired by continued success. In truth, many will learn nothing from this defeat, but some will and that's necessary progress.
I think at some level the Blue Tribe is uncomfortable discussing mental capability. Both at a personal and political level it is an awkward thing to bring up.
Andy G has a point. Blue Tribe definitely believes in intelligence. They just think the only valid test for it is party affiliation.
“I think at some level the Blue Tribe is uncomfortable discussing mental capability.”
All due respect, bullshit.
Blue Tribe has had no compunction whatsoever against claiming that *Trump* is deranged, demented, unfit, ...
"they absolutely deserve it."
But WE don't and have to live with the same consequences.
The Biden thing was an arrogant, stupid political strategy by a group of people who wanted to stay in power, and it deserves to be criticized as such. But guess what, that's politics - you could say the same about Signal Pete Hegseth and his gang flouting opsec, or all the Republicans who went along with Trump's unhinged rants about Haitian immigrants eating pets, or George Bush's crew making up stories about WMD in Iraq (fwiw, they were very much the "populist" side 20 yrs ago) ...or hell, even Nixon and Watergate.
If this is the thrust of the argument fair enough, I'm on board, but it's just the standard critique of politicians of all stripes, I don't see what railing against "the elite", as if they are some distinct political class, adds to it.
Social media ceased to be a barometer of the public mood after the Arab Spring, when every authoritarian regime on the planet realised that pumping out bots to “influence” sentiment and force their desired views to trend was an effective way to culture jam the West. Close your eyes and pretend you’re listening to “the people” if you like - you’re a useful tool for foreign elites.
Got this far and no further
"As for the Trump presidency itself, I have been vocal about some stuff I think is bad, but I think it is too early to tell what the exact impact will be long term."
I mean, really. Three months in and he's broken any trust in America as a safe investment, a defense partner, a research community, a tourism destination, or even just somewhere where habeas corpus is a meaningful proposition.
What the hell are you expecting in the next 45 months that might undo the damage already wrought?
There is a Supreme Court and mechanisms in place to stop him from doing whatever he wants.
Right, except so far the Supreme Court has immunized the president from criminal charges, slow walked cases against him, and refused to rule against Trump in anything other than minor procedural grounds while approving of his substantive actions. These are not the actions of a muscular Court that's going to defend the rule of law.
Additionally I want to point something out you're missing from your analysis and that Scott only lightly addresses in his piece. Which is that plenty of people saw this coming. For years, people all over the political spectrum said "hey, Trump has no principles other than that of a narcissistic bully and fundamentally doesn't believe in the rule of law. He has surrounded himself by people who gleefully lie about anything as long as it suits their purposes, and appear to have no principles beyond the gathering of power or destruction of the government. This will be a disaster." And the centrist edglords consistently ignored the Cassandras, instead choosing to harp on smug annoying leftists in academia. So yeah, as far as policies and beliefs go I think the centrist edglords were probably all correct. But as far as the consequences of those policies go, the dramatic screaming liberals were also entirely right. And quite frankly I don't give a shit about how a trans-womans grip strength compares to a cis-womans or whatever it is you think the leftist elites were so desperately wrong about. The centrist edglords were warned about the consequences, ignored them, and now are trying to pretend there was no way to see this coming. Feel free to blame all the ridiculous woke liberals for their stupid beliefs, but have the decency to acknowledge that the centrist edglords spent years critiquing firefighters while the Republicans happily ran through the house pouring gas and playing with matches.
But ppl like me didn’t endorse Trump!
Sure, I'm not saying you did. But we're talking about Scott and Twilight of the Edgelords, where Beroe loosely stands in for Scott and his opinions. And the consistent theme throughout the piece is that Beroe believes that the liberal establishment was so anti-science and free speech that they had to be stood against. That sure, the populist right was frothing at the mouth to lock people up for protected speech and ban vaccines, but that on a long enough time frame establishment liberals would probably have been worse. That's not me being uncharitable, Beroe makes that argument like 6 paragraphs in. Personally, I think spending your time and effort rightfully criticizing the stupid aqueduct policies of the later Roman Empire is totally fine and often worthwhile, but if you're doing it while the Visigoths are battering down the gates you have a fundamentally misplaced set of priorities.
Ugh that's not a good analogy. The Visigoths in this case were created by the bad aqueducts
Fair, it was inapt metaphor picked for evocative imagery over accuracy. But blaming right wing backlash on leftist excesses is a fundamental misreading of the dynamic. The ACA was modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan that had been successfully implemented by Republican governor Mitt Romney. But as soon as Democrats tried to implement it all the Republicans started screaming about government death panels and tyranny. Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public-private partnership under insane conditions that saved countless American lives. But Trump suddenly decided the pandemic wasn't real, so his own massively success program was thrown under the bus and now the NIH is gutted and the health secretary is trying to cure measles with vitamin A.
What's the proper lesson to take from this? I don't think the lesson is that if only establishment leftists has been more reasonable and implemented all of the centrist policy positions we wouldn't be here. I think the lesson is that it doesn't matter what you do, the conservatives will be against it. If the Democratic party pivoted tomorrow and put Richard Hanania in charge the right would still be screaming about insane leftists wanting to sell your children as gay child brides to Hamas. I'm not even joking, I had a conversation a week ago with a woman who voted for Trump because she thought Harris wanted to import Hamas into her rural Colorado town to rape her and her daughter. What establishment liberal policy do you think is to blame for that position?
Look, I'm a Libertarian who was a sociology major in college. I was surrounded by living stereotypes of smug, ignorant, woke assholes in every single class. But you could at least argue policy with them, in the last election the RNC's official policy platform was "whatever Trump wants". Populism is not a response to establishment policies, populism is a middle finger to everything people think is currently wrong with the world. And if you can't trust the Republicans to support their own policies when the establishment enacts them, then arguing that a different policy would have a different outcome is a fundamental misreading of what's happening.
Trump was elected in 2016. Robin D'Angelo's "White Fragility" was published in 2018, Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" was published in 2019. Black Lives Matter protests (mostly) happened in 2020. That Holden Thorpe tweet was from 2023. This theme can be built out more, but my point is this: All of the supposedly intolerable idpol excesses of liberal elites took place *after* Trump was elected the first time. Trump was not a product of some out-of-touch liberal elitism; if anything, the out-of-touch liberal elitism was an immune response to an invasive and malignant organism.
Trump won against Hilary Clinton by being a famous carnival barker who skewered conservative pieties while facing off against a ludicrously unpopular candidate. He then lost to Joe Biden because he was a famous carnival barker who got 1M Americans killed during COVID and people took his continued political career seriously enough to come out to vote against him. He then won in 2024 by not being the president who oversaw the 2021-2022 inflationary boom—which is basically the only explanation you need when you look at global post-COVID political developments.
All of which is to say, you can paint a very clear and convincing picture of the Donald Trump phenomenon—and even lower-tier actors like Ron Desantis—without giving a whiff of credibility or consideration to the idea that it was a reaction to something liberals were doing.
John Tester and Mike Sides' book "Identity Crisis" demonstrates pretty convincingly that the election of Barack Obama cracked the minds of the Republican Party and American conservatives. This was as much an elite conservative phenomenon as it was a normie conservative phenomenon. The subsequent election of Donald Trump was the product of that. COVID finished the job and broke the rest of American conservatism's thin hold on reality and any moral commitments. You don't need anger at diversity statements or DEI trainings or anything of the sort to explain what happened.
The Visigoths weren't created by the bad aqueducts. The Visigoths were created by a ravenous hatred of Barack Obama.
A better analogy is seeing big chunks of the leftist liberal establishment as the Ostrogoths, and not as stupid Aqueduct builders.
The Visigoths were more virtuous than the Roman establishment. Come on lol
I see "I think it is too early to tell what the exact impact will be long term" as effectively an endorsement.
If you have incredibly low standards for supporting someone, sure.
It is better to make arguments against Trump's shittiest policies without losing all credibility catastrophizing or making unaccountable predictions.
"Additionally I want to point something out you're missing from your analysis and that Scott only lightly addresses in his piece. Which is that plenty of people saw this coming. For years, people all over the political spectrum said "hey, Trump has no principles other than that of a narcissistic bully and fundamentally doesn't believe in the rule of law. He has surrounded himself by people who gleefully lie about anything as long as it suits their purposes, and appear to have no principles beyond the gathering of power or destruction of the government. This will be a disaster." And the centrist edglords consistently ignored the Cassandras, instead choosing to harp on smug annoying leftists in academia. So yeah, as far as policies and beliefs go I think the centrist edglords were probably all correct. But as far as the consequences of those policies go, the dramatic screaming liberals were also entirely right."
I'm confused. People "saw this coming"? You mean liberals saw Trump coming? Yes, many "edgelords" (I think that moniker is dumb, but I guess it's what we've got) saw it too. It's part of the reason we cajoled and criticized and lambasted the elite leadership! Yes, we were "warned" that our dissent from the elite orthodoxy was giving aid and cover to our enemies, but this smacks of simply authoritarian control to me. If we hadn't been critical, the populists would have been just as powerful. They were not responding to edgelord criticisms of elites; they were responding to elites themselves! Instead, the elites attempted to muzzle the edgelords because our arguments suggested that the elites had lost their way, that they were less moral and less correct they they thought themselves. Rather than engage with edgelords, they strove to shut them up, in part by saying that we were empowering populists.
And those are simply the pragmatic concerns. By the lights of our principles, there was no responsible way *not* to dissent. Authoritarian exercise of power is authoritarian exercise of power and that is anathema.
Others have sort of pointed this out already, but there are two problems with your argument:
1) The premise is just wrong. Scott wrote an essay endorsing "anyone but Trump" three times! I don't know what more you'd want him to do, but he probably did that too. This is the opposite of ignoring the Cassandras; he *was* one of them. Excepting Hanania, I'm pretty sure that's broadly true of edgelordism 2015-2025.
2) The way liberals/leftists went about criticizing Trump might as well have been an endorsement. If you really want voters to turn away from a candidate, you don't yell at and scold his supporters about how uniquely evil he is and so they simply have to surrender and vote for the unmodified guy you want! That, pragmatically, does not work, and the reason it doesn't is because the voter is not as stupid as you seem to think: he can at least recognize an obvious trap when he sees it.
Instead, what you must do is yell at *the other side*, the ones you want to win, about how uniquely evil this guy is and therefore they must throw all their shitty policies that are turning voters into the arms of a psycho overboard as quickly as possible. I admit this one has a low probability of working too, but at least it has *some* probability of working.
thanks for this comment. It's important to note most "centrists" were against Trump, as another point.
Well, at least some "centrist edgelords" were criticizing politicians for paying attention to "annoying leftists in academia" But more important, all of the valid criticism of the Biden administration (better said, the Warren-Sanders Administration) -- too high deficits, failure to reform taxes to raise revenue, trade restrictions (outside of a few areas of Chinese exports), failure to reform immigration to attract more high-skilled immigrants -- are even stronger crcism of the Trump prospective and now actual program.
How does that *reverse* the damage done? At best it prevents further damage from being done. The supreme court can't even get the presidency to bring back ONE GUY from El Salvador, who is there illegally by all accounts of the facts.
I suspect this is the true problem with centrists: an overcorrection for the hysteria of extremists by not being appropriately hysterical.
The Trump administration has been shocking. Its erratic economic policies will be damaging, and the actions they've taken against Green card holders have been truly awful.
But your comment lacks historical perspective. The US has been just as bad, and sometimes worse, at many points in our history. Recall Korematsu, or the abuses undertaken in the name of the global war on terror. Our government has broken the trust of the world, our allies, and even its own citizens many times in the past. But it's also rebuilt it, every time. That won't just happen, and may not even start in the next forty-five months, but there's no reason to think it's impossible, or even very hard.
Nothing is impossible and noting is to be gained by thinking recovery is, but really, the degree of destruction and in just 3 months is really unprecedented.
"The degree of destruction and in just 3 months is really unprecedented".
The pace, yes, but I think that's the whole of it. It's hard to make a definitive case because history offers few clear comps.
What I really want to argue is that the administration has not committed a pivotal act, something that changes everything irrevocably (such as, say Hiroshima). Trump has yet to burn the ships. And so, the future is an open question.
The tariffs alone are irrevocable. The only way trade resumes with China now is by giving up something as a gift to them, like destroying the CHIPS act, which leads to the irrevocable situation of China becoming the dominant superpower. Or the Tariffs stay in place, in which case they have effectively destroyed US-Chinese trade. That's not to mention the 10% applied to every other country on earth. This is a pivotal moment for the US.
I am also white-knuckling the tariffs, but "irrevocable" doesn't mean what you seem to think.
Explain in detail how you can revoke the tariffs and their effects at this stage.
Yea, what's weird is that Dubya shocked and turned off Europeans too - not this bad, admittedly, but we couldn't compare it to now, then - but now that contingent of conservative is *part* of the Euro crowd shocked by Trump.
The war on terror alienated absolutely no one except the few countries and people who centrists believe to be too extreme. Hell, American allies *participated* in the war on terror--with glee, even!
This is simply false. The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alone damaged our standing for a long time, in many ways. As much as I despise the administration's conduct towards green card holders (and Abrego Garcia), this is nothing compared to the shock felt in the US and across the world when Sixty Minutes aired their special on Guantanamo (followed shortly by Seymour Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker).
Beyond that, our open embrace of electronic surveillance, secret courts, and extraordinary rendition substantively altered diplomatic relations.
As I said farther up, your point of view lacks any sense of history. We should fight specific Trump administration actions which are bad enough they don't need hyperbole to justify opposition.
You accuse me of having some hyperbolic interpretation of history, but what does "damage our standing for a long time" mean precisely? How was it worse than the current administration for Americans?
Yes, the words we're using are imprecise. The OP wrote "he's broken any trust in America as a safe investment, a defense partner, a research community, a tourism destination, or even just somewhere where habeas corpus is a meaningful proposition."
Those are terms that don't have obvious metrics, much less a consensus about what they mean. I originally commented to inject some sense of proportion into the discussion, even though I don't have all the answers. I do, however, know that people forget history, and anyone that has lived through the war on terror as an adult with recognize a lot of this rhetoric. (To say nothing of capital-H-history.)
Your level of engagement has been extremely weak so far. I can take some lumps and don't mind disagreement but unless you offer more clarity, demonstrate you have a rudimentary theory of my mind, or show a scrap of imagination, I'm done with this discussion.
"Those are terms that don't have obvious metrics"
Nonsense, you can easily measure tourism, research output and researcher count, court appeals and appeal outcomes, investment stability, and defense spending and mission readiness. I wouldn't say it's clear at this point that all of these are down, but you can clearly measure literally all of them.
All I asked why the war on terror is worse than the current administration in terms of alliance degradation, and then I asked a follow up question. This, apparently, is "less than rudimentary theory of mind".
I have to say I also recoiled at that statement but I did read the whole thing.
My thoughts are along the lines of:
Criticizing liberal elites and setting up a permission structure for and contributing money to Tr, M and the rest of the scumbags are two different things with the former being fine and necessary.
Only in the minds of people in your bubble, Graham. And no, that's not snark. That's the important reality that evades you.
Outside your bubble, a lot of that trust was broken more by the previous administration.
Ok. Here's a link to another comment I wrote under this piece. It's not an exhaustive list, but it gives a flavour.
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-edgelords-were-right-a-response/comment/108514667
Just so I don't stay stuck in my bubble, could you please give examples of what the previous administration did that's equivalent to kidnapping innocent people off the streets, rendering them to El Salvador and, thus far, refusing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling to repatriate them?
Or hitting supposed allies with poorly calculated tariffs that left Iran in a better position than Israel?
Your phrasings make clear that it's a waste of time to try to talk you out of your delusions, but for the sake of setting the record straight, we might start with the years-long imprisonments of people who protest near abortion clinics, the arresting of many people over "J6" and detaining them for years without trials (some of whom weren't even on site and many of whom broke no laws), and your European counterparts imposing years-long prison sentences on sexual assault victims who dare to talk about their experiences on social media.
As for Abrego Garcia, a low-information person might be forgiven for believing that he wasn't in the country illegally given the media's dance around that fact in all of its coverage. It's absurd that deportation cases are considering the criminal's "best interest" - shall we ask whether it's in a bank robber's best interest to give the money back? But of course, you are left-wing people, and that means that you know as well as anyone that you can't win an honest argument, so here you are calling him an "innocent person", or even incorrectly calling him a "citizen".
Your party's lies and incompetence allowed the Taliban to waltz into Kabul, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe for millions of people. You invited the Russians to invade Ukraine, then claimed that the problem will be solved by shoveling a few more billion US tax dollars over there. You even provoked October 7 by making it crystal clear to Hamas that if they butchered enough civilians to force Israel to respond, they could turn the deluded West against Israel.
I'm not nearly naive enough to think that you'll ever comprehend - let alone take responsibility for - the everyday horrors that your partisanship hath wrought. You only want to hate the people who are stuck cleaning up your messes.
But back to where we started: You genuinely don't comprehend the fact that your perspective is a minority one. You think the whole world (or at least everyone who matters) agrees with you. That is why your partisanship continues to have horrible predictive power. You lie to yourselves far more than to anyone else.
And that's really saying something.
Oh dear. One of us is certainly in a bubble, regurgitating Kremlin talking points. But I don't think it's me.
Ah, the "Kremlin" line. You certainly now how to eliminate any doubt as to your integrity.
You're a bad person, Graham. You truly are. I hope you realize that someday and change.
You are, quite simply a liar. I don't know whether you know that or whether you're simply regurgitating someone else's lies, but a liar you are.
I assure you the contempt is mutual.
Where is that quotation in this article? I cannot find it...
This piece seems to have been substantially edited since first published, without being properly noted. Up to you what you make of that, I suppose.
If you received the original version by email, it's bottom of the 3rd paragraph.
Understood. Thanks for the response.
I see it as a strength that the author updated due to feedback. I wish more writers did that.
It would reassure a reader to have the edits identified.
I honestly don't know enough about the consequences of tariffs etc to comment and I felt like maybe I'm downplaying things that shouldn't be downplayed.
Honestly, writing from the UK, it does feel like you are downplaying a lot that shouldn't be downplayed. It is hard to overstate the shock and dismay caused since January, *even amongst those previously pretty positive about Trump*. Gerard Baker, for example, writing in Rupert Murdoch's The [London] Times is appaled and bewildered at America's foreign and economic policies.
I cannot overstate how badly being lectured by the Vice-President on "free speech" as you openly side with a murderous dictator over an invaded democracy, snatch innocent people from the streets and render them to an El Salvador concentration camp, or deport students for writing op-eds has gone down. You then engaged on a chaotic programme of ripping up the global trading order patiently built since at least 1980, leading at one point to Iran having better trading terms than Israel, and uninhabited islands whose only inhabitants are penguins being slapped with tariffs because you don't understand your own data.
To be honest, whilst you are free to write whatever you want, a piece describing how, actually, this is the fault of the people who said it would be bad and should be avoided feels at best like a frog writing about how annoying those people who said getting in the saucepan with this lovely warm water would be unwise were, and at worst like wilful deflection. Sorry.
I disagree. Notating edits is very annoying to readers, and it is not her job to reassure you.
The goal is not to get it right the first time. The goal is constant improvement.
Think of every Substack column as a rough draft.
I guess I am just used to having edits documented. I find it helpful to see how a piece of writing has evolved, though agree excessive notation can needlessly disrupt readability.
Really like the case you build for elite self-repair over populist collapse.
Re: your optimism: I suspect the 2026 midterms will be an early test. If the MAGA wing gets rolled by centrists (from either party), it signals a recalibration is happening. If not, it may suggest the edgelords didn’t break the system. Rather they just underestimated how broken it already was.
I am not sure that she is arguing for "elite self-repair." I think that she is arguing for criticizing the elites when they are incorrect and not worrying that doing so might cause a populist backlash against them.
And I do not believe that centrists can prosper in either party for reasons that I outline in this article:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-1-who-controls-american
I just think you can't be like oh I will never criticize elites because what if ppl vote for Trump. It just doesn't seem like a good habit
The problem could be that MAGA gets rolled but not by centrists.
I hate the term 'populism', I just don't think it's all that useful. It makes it sounds like the problem with certain policies is that they're popular, which is obviously not it.
The key feature that's bad about what we call "populism" is its illiberalism. The sales pitch of the "populist" is that a devotion to principles, rules or norms is getting in the way of solving some urgent problem. The populist promises to get the problem solved no matter what. The argument against this approach is vague, abstract, far-mode thinking -- which is why the argument against it is usually 'elite' or 'unpopular'.
We don't call "We can't afford to worry about a commitment to the truth" populist, but it's bad for the same reasons. If we embrace illiberal solutions to some crisis, we're unlikely to be in a better position at the end of it.
The 'elites' bent their principles a lot to get through the crisis of the 2020 election. But it's not like they then cleaned house once that was how they'd won. There was no circling back around and saying, "Yes we all went along with the idea that opposing illegal immigration was racist, but we really should do something about this". Instead there was a doubling down on the same approach, with really no debate within the centre/left, putting us in an even worse position in 2024.
If we refuse to critique 'our own side' because we need to hold off even worse ideas, what's going to make the ideas on our side easier to defend in future? We're just going to get further into debt.
So I really don't think we should credit the argument that it was the 'edgelords' who were at fault. What we needed was more of that medicine sooner.
I agree with all your points and yes I think illiberal is a better term.
Otherwise this is kinda the point of my article (that criticizing elites if they do bad stuff is good)
Yeah it was definitely agreement. I should've said that explicitly.
I see a lot of people writing "sure, go ahead and criticize the left / expert consensus, but only if you balance it with criticisms of Trump."
Earlier this year, a commenter on Slow Boring wrote exactly that: "I think it’s fine to complain about left of center people, spending more time doing that than attacking the right or suggesting that they’re anywhere near as bad as Trump is, in fact, morally bad, and if you do it, you deserve to be socially sanctioned." Incredibly, we went from "Trump is evil" to "voting for Trump is evil" to "not talking 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 about Trump's badness is evil."
This is, among many other things, a deeply defective theory of persuasion.
I suspect that no one - probably literally zero people - would have voted for Harris instead of Trump if you or Scott had spent 10% more time writing about how bad MAGA is, much less a larger amount. Instead, they would have stopped reading you, especially if they were the kind of rote denunciations that already abound on the internet.
By contrast, I've been hanging on to the center-left by a thread for a decade. One of the main things that has kept me here is the existence of sane center/center-left voices that don't waste my time with pointless throat-clearing. To be fair, MAGA and Trump have played a major role in keeping me on-side, but I hardly need writers to tell me how bad they are (though I appreciate it when you have something insightfully negative to say about them).
A lot of this is contingent on *when* the persuasion is taking place. Are we in campaign season and our choices are binary, or are we in policy season where good arguments can influence policymakers?
Matt Yglesias made the observation last year that the Free Press wields its influence in part by what it chooses to cover. (He wrote this in admiration, not a backdoor way to call them fascists.) Right now the GOP is trying to wipe out huge chunks of Medicaid, something that was utterly predictable during the campaign. This is a health care issue that affects millions of people on a day to day basis. But the Free Press's coverage of health care is focused on MAHA adjacent stuff like microplastics and gender affirming care.
Your bleeding heart can want more Medicaid spending all you want, but a) the country can’t afford it, and b) the country can’t afford it, and c) it contributes to the dysfunction of the current healthcare system, includes a bunch of waste and fraud, and contributes to why healthcare’s prices are so high. The incentives are all wrong.
Oh, and d) the country can’t afford it.
The country can’t afford Trump. He has already ruined the economy and he is going to explode the deficit. When we talk about Medicaid the questions shouldn’t be “can we afford it” but “how can we afford it and keep costs low enough”? Everyone deserves some healthcare.
Wow, that sounds like something the Free Press should cover instead of microplastics.
Or in addition to.
Not that I’m defending microplastics as a particularly important topic for TFP to cover. But the one has close to zero to do with the other.
You are, of course, free to start your own publication. I hear there’s this pretty good platform around that enables you to do just that… 😏
The article is about edgelord support for Trump.
There is a contingent of edgelord-adjacent media that likes to talk about cultural issues they align with Trump on while ignoring other aspects of Trump. Tariffs and health care are good examples of that.
I think that is bad.
No, the article is about "edgelord's" share of the blame for Trump being elected. Which frankly is just a silly thing to be discussing, period.
Though I understand why some center-leftists and anti-Trump centrists think said conversation might be worthwhile, rather than focus on the actual issue (which is Dem policies, and to a lesser extent Dem narratives above and beyond those policies, all moving hard to the left).
Yes, I get from your center-left reading list that there are things about center-right, libertarian and right writers you don't like (probably most things that aren't anti-Trump center right).
Because of course NO ONE in the media talks about cultural issues where they *don't* align with Trump, so clearly that's a space TFP needs to fill...
If you keep reasoning as you do, you will be somewhere right of center sooner enough.
2032 at the very latest.
Things are nicer on this side (and I ain’t referring to hard-core MAGA). You’ll be a happier person.
2 immediate thoughts:
a) There is a dearth of virtue / character in the zone where elite human capital meets the public sphere. If we graphed vice and virtue (y) from Left to Right (x) we'd likely see a bi-modal distribution for the former and a normal distribution for the latter. That Scott wants to look himself in the mirror (despite not being the problem) is virtuous.
There are too many smart, accomplished people in public facing academia and journalism / social media that destroy any good-will / coalition building by simultaneously offering something proximate to wisdom but delivered in a petty, antagonistic, manipulative (emphasis on the last) manner. This is the mark of the insecure seeking status and not that of a leader(s).
b) While it may be true that 'elites are axiomatically more fit to rule,' the pool of elites can't only come from universities, tech, etc. You mention something important about 'those with ability to raise the status of others:' Going a step further, the accomplished could do more in the recruitment of talent outside of universities (in particular). My belief / simple heuristic is that too many elites today are selected by the feminine mechanism (a pool of suitor applicants seeking the collective's approval (e.g. universities) and too few from the masculine (the collective actively seeking talented individuals).
> My belief / simple heuristic is that too many elites today are selected by the feminine mechanism (a pool of suitor applicants seeking the collective's approval (e.g. universities) and too few from the masculine (the collective actively seeking talented individuals).
Aren't those masculine "actively seeking talents" the tech right? I mean, if you've founded and grown a company that's worth millions or billions, you've pretty much proved your talent and demonstrated a ton of agency, and a whole lot of them are college dropouts.
Haven't people always complained that money and businessmen have and demonstrate more power than most politicians?
Don't wait to be elevated by some outside elite, build a company, it's a surer way to power and status than a college degree or politics.
Yes, to a degree. But there are other domains with (other types of) talent, not just highly visible / highly profitable ones. Tech could be used as a template of sorts. I saw where Palantir recently announced a program to attract talent as an alternative to college (still an apply and be approved model, though).
Think about sports recruiting. How many talented young people eventually rose to the top or at least had a modicum of success that may have otherwise withered and died had some talent recruiter not been sent into the wild to find them and pull them into a system where they could potentially thrive.
(Edit: Remove unintentional link.)
The idea of making better elites is extremely old. For thousands of years political philosophy could be summed up as "how do we make better kings?" and what you're asking for here isn't different.
Let it go. The "elites" have never been elite; they have always sucked. 100 years ago the EHC consensus was that communism was a brilliant idea, that planned economies would be superior to capitalism and that Stalin wasn't so bad really. The communists claimed to fight for the working class but it was an endless stream of shitty Ivy League/Oxbridge Elite Human Capital who were so easily brainwashed by nonsense that they leaked sensitive documents to the Soviets, thinking they were making the world a better place by doing so.
In hindsight, we can see how wrong they were. But also in foresight! People like Bakunin were pointing out how stupid Marxism was right from the moment Marx first started writing. Then in the 21st century the elites went all-in on Marxism v2 despite it being even more obviously stupid a second time around.
Go back in time further and the elites don't get smarter. They have always been in hock to dumb ideas.
The fix for all this isn't to try and selectively breed a more elite kind of human. It's to recognize that "elite" almost invariably only has meaning in the context of government and those who try to influence that government. Shrink the government to its core requirements, let people figure out the rest by themselves and suddenly the need for a better elite is much less pressing, or gone entirely. And that's actually a practical project, whereas getting academics to stop cheating isn't.
I don’t agree that the elites have always sucked.
At least as badly as they do now.
Sure they have always been self-interested and flawed.
But the post-WWII throug about 2005 U.S. elites seemed to govern “well enough”, if not actually “well”.
But what they’ve done the last 17 years, and especially their lawfare against Trump and how they governed from 2020-2024, is beyond indefensible.
The way to do it is - even if we’re gonna have some welfare and old-age transfers, otherwise bring things back towards the founding, and get the government to spend less and do less.
But there is precious little appetite for that.
And *none at all* on the part of the left elites.
Indeed. Many of the issues we have now are rooted in the post-WW2 to 2005 era consensus, so I'd disagree that they governed well enough. They set up a lot of very deep rooted cultural and policy problems that will take a long time to unwind, if it ever happens at all.
For instance, the relentless growth of the government I'm criticizing here was largely a post-war phenomenon.
No argument.
Perhaps I should substitute “far less badly” for “well enough”?
And imo the other factor is the bad elite policies back then seemed more actually well-intentioned and less purely self-serving and/or virtue signaling than today’s.
Though of course no doubt it is a spectrum.
But the spectrum seems clearly a lot darker in more recent years.
I never used to believe in claims of repetition of the fall of the Holy Roman empire.
I do now.
Trump is a criminal. He should have been convicted for Jan 6 too.
I agree with you.
The goal should be to reform the elites. Our elites are not less intelligent or less competent than previous eras. Instead, so many of them derive their social status and moral identity from Left-of-Center ideology that conflict with material reality, and this leads to dysfunctional behavior.
I do not believe, however, that convincing them intellectually is enough.
Nor is this anything new. Elites have always tried to expropriate the gains of material progress from the masses to use it for their own self-interest and then rationalizing it through their unique value system.
The solution, I believe, is transparent non-violent transparent competition between elites rather than the current practice of federal government subsidies via the following:
1) Freedom of speech, particularly on social media. Social media will only get more important as a means of communication, and there have been clear attempts by the federal government to restrict freedom of speech on those platforms.
If we lose freedom of speech, all our other rights are in much greater danger.
2) Transparency - Soft Totalitarianism thrives in secrecy. The more the American people know about what is going on within bureaucracies, the easier it is for us to fight back.
3) Merit-based hiring, firing, and promotions - The key to smuggling activists into public and private bureaucracies are the policies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This undermines the proper functioning of all our institutions and undermines their legitimacy. Worse, it is blatant racial and gender discrimination.
4) Radical reductions in government, corporate, and non-profit bureaucracies - Soft Totalitarians thrive in bureaucracies. The smaller the bureaucracy, the less likely that Soft Totalitarians impose their will slowly by bureaucratic rules.
5) Decentralization - The Founders established the US Constitution on the principle of Federalism, but we have gotten away from it in the last century. We need a massive shift of domestic powers away from the federal government and towards the state and local governments.
6) Competition between institutions - Competition forces organizes to focus on results. And if free citizens get to choose which institutions to vote for, work within, buy from, invest in, and donate to, then a large portion of those results flow to the masses.
7) Elimination of government subsidies - Government subsidies isolate organizations from competition, so they tend to produce bad results.
8) Creation of new institutions based on the above principles to compete with ideologically captured institutions.
For those who are interested, I write more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-soft-totalitarianism
> if anyone is to actually be assigned indirect responsibility for future negative consequences
This is an awkward framing. Is there a particular reason for it?
Obviously the rise of the current moment is multicausal. The bad behavior patterns that took hold among cultural elites are one cause. The appeasement and enabling of populists by the "edgelords" are another cause. (And a third major cause is of course simply the timing of inflation. And a fourth major cause is Biden refusing to bow out until it was too late for his replacement to run a full campaign.) Not all causes are equal; some are obviously bigger than others. But everyone who contributed to our current bad outcomes deserves some share of the blame, and ought learn a suitable lesson about what they themselves could have done better.
A position like "Other people were more at fault than my side was, therefore I will learn no lesson" is nonsensical moral reasoning, or in some cases corrupt moral reasoning. So to the extent you think that position is a fair interpretation of this post, it's a call for reconsidering the approach.
Agreed, “should edgelords accept some of the blame” is kind of a clumsy clickbait-y way of posing the question and I feel like Ruxandra got a bit too anchored on/triggered by this framing, to the detriment of this post
I think inflation and other factors were definitely important, but to the extent that culture or anti elite sentiment played a role, I'm saying the blame shouldn't be w/ the ppl who (reasonably) pointed out some things were wrong. If you think it's mostly about economics or non cultural matters or so then neither edgelords nor elites are to blame. I mean elites could be blamed to the extent that they caused the economic consequences
Scott's article is paywalled so I don't know whether that's a fair summary of his point, but I 100% agree w/ you that you're entirely within your rights to criticize the wokeness, etc you think is wrong - I agree w/ you on a lot of it. But also...my gut feel is that you're strawmanning a bit.
To try to steelman his case - I reread your post and I think your theory of how the "elite establishment" is the primary root cause of all social change is just wrong. Also I don't see why you think they have "higher responsibility than the rest of people" - I think people who supported Trump are plenty accountable for the consequences, whether or not they meet your definition of "elite". I think that's the real criticism of the "edgy centrists".
For one, I think you're pulling a bit of a motte-and-bailey, being mainly focused on liberal/progressive/woke actors (which, fair enough!) but also claiming you're really just addressing the elite establishment that has all the real power. It's a curious "elite" that includes the editor of Science but not Elon Musk, who has been spreading all manner of bullshit for years, or finance types, like Bill Ackman who arrogantly thought Trump was going to be great for the economy and is now lamely claiming no one could have seen his tariff disaster coming, or Fox News, or pretty much any Republican in government. I think all the terrible things. I think you're wrong that Hanania is "catastrophizing" or that all the terrible things you acknowledge have just been "unleashed on X" and aren't so bad b/c they'll eventually be confined to the gutters of society. (As Keynes said "in the long run we're all dead"). I think what you call populism is a social force, and moral culpability of its own and needs to be called out. It's not simply something that will disappear if we can just get those pesky liberal elite to stop being woke.
I'm sure you'll disagree with lots of that, and it's worthy of further debate, but I think that's the real knock on edgy centrist, not just "you can't criticize the wokes b/c it helps Trump"
Can we please retire the word woke? Thanks.
I think the cultural elite was wrong in many ways, and woke isn't the best way to describe it. It's become a cliché. Scott is involved in criticizing the intellectual/ cultural elite. He's asking if he's responsible for Trump.
Until recently, Elon was simply a financial elite.
Maybe the switch to Trump has nothing to do with culture, in which case neither the old intellectual elite nor Scott are causal for Trump getting elected. But, if we assume there's a cultural component to this switch, I argue it's not Scott who's to be assigned a causal role.
Elon is becoming a cultural elite thru his ownership of X and explicit attempts to influence culture, which he's succeeding at, and ppl like Scott are criticizing him plenty. But he wasn't doing that in 2015 when Scott was writing abt the failures of intellectual elites.
Scott isn't a tech analyst or a financial analyst or whatever. He's a cultural commentator so the elites that are relevant and which he argued against were never Elon or the ppl making the US fiscal policy.
Obviously I can't speak for Ruxandra. And I think my views differ from hers quite a bit. But her instincts are correct. Because to me, the crux of the matter isn't a matter of moral culpability. It's a matter of the structural incentives.
Democracy is best-suited to a small, high-trust society. Like a bunch of friends who decide how to split a dinner bill. Decisions are made earnest because there's a shared sense of destiny and purpose. And they can keep each other accountable because they know each other personally. However, the US is neither small nor high-trust. Instead, it's multi-cultural [0] and multi-ethnic. And voters do not cast votes face-to-face, they vote secretly in a ballot box. The result is constant screeching and bickering. Despite this, decision-making has continually been centralized rather than decentralized over the course of the US's history. (Curious how "Democratic Agonism" is supposedly so wonderful, and yet "nitty-gritty politics" is so miserable, isn't it.)
So in order for the USG to protect its technical competence from the stupidity of its own voters, it developed the Deep State. Particularly under FDR. This is deeply undemocratic, because it's not actually accountable to the voters. But the USG has to maintain the facade of democracy anyway, because the written Constitution is so sacred. And it can maintain this facade easily, because "democracy at scale" = "faceless bureaucracy at scale", which allows the system to play hot-potato with accountability. Meanwhile, the Deep State is ruled by a meritocratic elite who don't actually practice Noblesse Oblige. Thus, the union exists in a state of tension of having to continually hide its true nature.
IIRC, Ruxandra brought up my favorite example of this under a separate post of Scott Alexander's, when she mentioned Bush Junior's invasion of Iraq. Bush lied about WMD's in order to justify protecting Aramco, royally fucked up the invasion of Kabul by presuming that the Iraqi military would defect in the name of LibRaL dEmOcRAcY, and then tried to stabilize the powervacuum by pouring trillions of dollars into "nation-building" a newly-agonistic failed-state, while telling the US footsoldiers that their high-level mission was to aimlessly wander around, and shoot back if necessary. At what point in this farce did our sacred democracy hold Bush Junior aCcOunTabLE for any of this? On one hand, I would have preferred a little honesty. But on the other hand, can Bush really be blamed for expecting the average voter to be too stupid to understand the geopolitical nuances of the petrodollar empire?
So when Ruxandra frames this in terms of "responsibility", it's not a tribal critique. Its a structural critique.
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Unfortunately, nobody is willing to talk about any of these issues openly. Because who would criticize modern liberal democracy on a *structural* basis, except for a raging fascist? And since I mentioned "multi-ethnic" earlier, I'm probably a bigot too, which allows respectable liberal turbo-normies to conveniently ignore the less-savory parts of reality while the ship continues to sink. Thus: "hm... maybe the edgelords are on to something!?" E.g. Hanania recently said something like "Trump is leaning into white idpol. This is bad because historically, leaders who lean into idpol (like Trump!!!1!) are more comfortable with blatant grift/corruption." Not only do I think Hanania is largely correct about Trump leaning into white idpol, but the situation was entirely predictable. Moldbug said (back during the *Obama years*) that one of the reasons he started UR was because he was afraid of what would happen if normies continued to refuse to openly discuss race-relations. In this comment section, Geary Johansen makes a similar observation:
> You make a good point, although it's worth noting that although I was an admirer of Obama, he made a couple of huge mistakes in terms of reracializing America, specifically in relation to K-12 and policing.
Therefore, Ruxandra is absolutely right to deflect blame from the edgelords. Scott is looking at the desolation of Trump, and understandably looking for explanations. But to blame the edgelords (e.g. the pro-MAGA pepe shitposters on twitter) is to shoot the messenger, at best. (At worst, it's blaming the firefighters for causing an arson.) The fact that moldbug (and arguably, TLP) called this during the *Obama years* should clearly demonstrate that the problems have been in the pipeline for quite some time. And the libs (perhaps with the exception of Scott, who's at least TRYING to understand) are continuing to double-down on their virtuous ignorance. It's not enough to just go "eh... I think we all deserve a little bit of blame" so long as the *multiple* elephants in the room continue to be willfully ignored.
p.s. Biden's endorsement of Harris represented a deliberate middle-finger to Obama and the Democratic Party establishment. He was big mad because he wanted to run against Trump's first campaign, but Obama pushed him aside because it was "Hillary's turn". Which speaks to Ruxandra's observation about infighting among the elites.
[0] I'm specifically thinking of Albion's Seed. It carries quite a lot of explanatory power about the current state of the culture wars. Curiously, Americans don't care about their own history. Because Americans are not a serious people.
"Firstly, it feels like Scott has been reading a lot of Richard Hanania, whom I agree with on a lot of points, but who I also believe is catastrophizing the situation"
Idk If I agree with you on the rest or not, but I strongly agree with this sentence, and specifically the back half of the sentence.
I hope you get through to Richard. He used to be a LOT more interesting; now he is becoming a drag whom I usually seek to avoid.
I believe half of his posts are trolling in such a way that it reads as sincere leftist virtue signalling. He basically says the quiet parts out loud but with a pro leftist framing and people are like yes this isn't ridiculous at all
I don’t really agree that he’s dishonest. I think in his OCDness he really believes the crap he’s spouting now.
IMO he’s just very anti- MAGA and anti- the alt-right, likely because he was once a slightly racist alt-righter himself, and so he fixates on that point, and on the worst of those folks, at the expense of literally everything else.
So now he’s no longer the brilliant, usually interesting, occasionally infuriating writer he used to be.
Instead he’s just an emotional, ranting TDS-er - or really MADSer (MAGA/Alt-right Derangement Syndrome) who is wrong more often than right.
Sad.
Great article!
Thanks :)
Great piece. Still, I feel you are being too kind to the elites, and I can't help a certain degree of schadenfreude, even if (as is usually the case) the ones who suffer the worst consequences aren't the worst culprits. Elites had plenty of warnings (Trump's first term!) to realize that their ridiculous leftist drifting, patrician and arrogant dismissal of the masses and doubling down on the wrong side of the 20/80 issues *had* to backfire some day. I am also more on the pessimistic side, though: while wisdom comes from suffering (Aeschylus), it still doesn't seem they have suffered enough, and I really doubt the Usual Suspects (Yglesias, Klein...) are going to turn the tables within the Dems.
On a side note: only EA and EA-adjacent people could pull off something like even theoretically and masochistically putting the blame on themselves for the excesses of populist right and populist left. And yet they never cease to amaze me.
Just as many interpreted the wave of Tumblr refugees to Twitter after the porn ban as a sudden uptick in “woke”, others have taken the breaking of 4chan containment for an increase in /poll sentiments. There is probably some truth in both observations, but exaggerated hugely by tribal migration. The Internet is a big place, and “extreme habits of discourse” correlates with “Lots of free time to shitpost”.
Do the elites here include the largest TV news network, the largest network of local TV channels, the richest man in the world, the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court super majority, Republican governors, congressmen, etc?
Scott has never been a political commentator.
He's mostly been a cultural one, so when he refers to criticizing the elites, he mostly means cultural/ intellectual ones. To the extent that he is political, he is democrat, and many "centrist edgelords" are, including Nate silver.
Fox News is not influential among the cultural/ intellectual elite. They do have power, power that translates directly into influencing electoral outcomes. And Scott isn't a Republican.
As for "the richest man in the world", he's until recently been a financial elite again smth Scott isn't specialised in criticizing. Since he's become more involved in the cultural/ political arena, he's been criticized plenty by centrist edgelords for promoting certain narratives and so on. Just look at what Jesse singal tweets all day abt these ppl.
If Elon and other right wing tech ppl become prominent financial elites become cultural players, I expect Scott and their centrist edgelords to criticize them. The twilight of the edgelords is in itself an implicit criticism of them as cultural players.
lol I know right? There's a bit of a motte-and-bailey dynamic here where she seems to want to criticize liberal/progressive/woke stuff specifically (which is totally fair, you can do that! I agree with a fair amount of it) but also claim the mantle of "what I'm *really* doing is taking on the 'elite establishment' that runs society", which apparently includes the editor of Science but not Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, or any Republicans in govt.
First, are We're talking about different elites. Intellectual vs financial. With the latter being aspiring kinda sort of intellectual tho mainly political.
Secondly, nowhere did I opine on bill ackman/elon, this is not even relevant to the point of this essay. Scott's question was: "was our criticism of the existing intellectual elite responsible for populism?". And I explain why it's wrong to think that way and why intellectual elites need to be criticised. As a note, now that Elon has taken a more political elite role, Scott is criticizing him too, tho he has never focused on criticizing political actors, he has mostly criticised intellectual ones.
I don't even know where Elon/ bill ackman feature in this argument ?!?
This seems like a post-hoc distinction. The post contains several references to elites, establishment elites, elite consensus, etc. and the great responsibility elites have towards society. I didn't see anything in it explaining how this only applies to academic elites and not elites in business, politics, or other fields. Musk and Ackman have expressed very clear views about how they think society should be structured and are attempting to use their elite power and social status to move society in that direction. I don't see how claiming they are "aspiring kinda sort of intellectual" means they matter less than say Harvard professors. If you're concerned about the impact of elites on the health of society then I would say political elites matter far more than "intellectual elites".
Also I think the distinction is also not as wide as you make it out to be - JD Vance and Peter Thiel have law degrees from Yale and Stanford, for instance. Which "elite bucket" do you put them in?
I thought Hanania’s response was spot on that “the problem with the edgelords is that that they (we) did a poor job of weighing the risks of populism and flawed elites at this particular point in history.” I think your critiques of “elites” are fair game but “populism” is a political force in its own right, one that’s been part of American history and done plenty of damage from the downfall of Reconstruction to the civil rights era to George Bush (I mean, supporting the invasion of Iraq was the populist position 20 years ago!) If you’re going to comment on politics, at some point you need to face it on its own terms and not just use it as a bogeyman to claim that if only those elites would stop doing all the things that annoy you then all our political problems would disappear.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
That you don’t understand that the problem is not the ”edgelords” as here, nor Trump, nor MAGA, but the *union* of Dem policy and Democratic narratives - and much more the former than the latter - is very sad.
I believe the word for people who get sad when someone has a different opinion than them is “snowflake”. Grow a pair dude
Very persuasive counterargument. I'm sold.
Great article. I had read Scott's piece on this, and it really didn't sit well. I feel the mayhem of Trump and the dumb elite syndrome on the Left, are apples and oranges. Trump is currently a bad case of shingles. It will pass, most likely. The dumb elite syndrome on the other hand, is systemic, controlling the institutions of knowledge and creeping towards State surveillance.
For good reason, many swing voters made a perilous calculation on election day. Long before then I personally sought out public intellectuals in the FIRE/Heterodox space to see what really had to be done. A lot of well-intentioned flaming arrows were being flung towards the ivory tower elites, but no one brought the trebuchet. No one was talking coalition.
The intellectual contraction of the Left resulted in a historic decline in confidence in the sciences, news media, and academia; and that helped fuel the emergence of new academic institutions, alliances, independent news media, and networks of scientists and public intellectuals who champion open civil conversation in the pursuit of truth. A market analysis of this political shift would probably reveal a coalition force capable of reaching funders and impacting institutions if not elections. I would hope the future includes some consideration of this.