Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public

Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public
thepullrequest.com

> Today the big issue is… what? Wearing MAGA hats? Racism certainly isn’t a divisive issue. Everybody’s against it. Capitalism isn’t much of an issue. Nobody even talks about class or poverty any more. Identity’s too diffuse and dispersed – if identitarians started fighting, it would look more like a scrum than a civil war.

That's not honest. It would be like saying that Reagan supporters in the 1980s only cared about welfare queens, without any substantive policy preferences regarding industrial regulation, unions, defense, etc. In reality "welfare queens" was short-hand for all the substantive policy preferences demanded by conservatives, as well as a statement about the perceived consequences of the excesses of liberal policies. Similar, MAGA hat derision is a liberal statement about the irony of promoting conservative, free market, anti-social safety net policies to "Make America Great Again" when from the left's perspective all the agreed upon societal ills--e.g. loss of blue collar jobs to free trade, lack of income growth combined with increasing income disparity, corporate oligopolies, etc--are a consequence of conservative, Republican, policies. The GOP was the architect of both NAFTA and China entering GATT/WTO.[1] The "neoliberal" movement in the Democratic party was a conservative movement; it was an adoption by some Democrats of conservative Republican economic policies in an attempt to win over increasingly Republican-leaning voters who had been successfully persuaded that traditionally Democratic economic policies (e.g. antagonism to free trade, pro union, "tax & spend" entitlements, etc) were hostile to job growth. And just as Democrats were scrambling to realign their economic platforms with the rightward shift in the electorate, so too was Labor doing exactly the same thing in the U.K. Thatcher and Reagan ushered in the preeminence of conservative economic policies, and Blair and Clinton were late-stage responses to that. To then blame Democrats and their "neoliberal" policies for the legacy of conservative (classically "liberal" outside the Anglosphere--note the semantic games) economic policies is... rich.

I'm sorry, but either Martin Gurri is less than 25 years old, or he's willfully misrepresenting actual, factual, not-particularly-distant political history. I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and he's simply using obtuse, scholarly-sounding terminology to sell a constructed narrative popular among far too many conservatives. I'm familiar with the tactic having heard plenty of similar B.S. political fantasies (e.g. Marxist, Fascist, etc, arguments) that build plausible seeming narratives around hidden, false premises.

There's plenty of blame to go around regarding contemporary cultural divisions. The conservatives were right in their criticisms of the left's identity politics and victim culture. Indeed, identity politics has swallowed up everybody, and it turns out the empowered and entitled often make for the most sympathetic victims of all. But let's be clear about who promoted what, when, and why before we start naming our oppressors and nominating our saviors.

[1] When NAFTA passed under a Clinton presidency, 2/3 of House Republicans voted for it (including Newt Gingrich, who successfully helped to push through special "fast-track" voting rules), while only 1/3 of Democrats voted for it. President Clinton, like Tony Blair in the U.K., was seen as successful precisely because of his conservative economic policies. Clinton also supported GOP authored welfare reform, including block grants to states (which Democrats feared would be directed away from the working class), despite fierce opposition from his own party.

They could start by not putting themselves in the position of being arbiters of information. As Gurri said, a little humility would go a long way.

... The furious protests would be against the tech companies, but those protesters would not be able to cohere around a specific action.

The closest analogy would be Occupy Wall St. There were large protests, and not many counter-protests (other than the tangentially related Tea Party ones, which were anti-government, not pro-Wall St.).