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I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.
It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.
I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly. And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too. They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be. At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.
I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at. It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren). But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing. And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust. This stuff isn't magic. But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.
Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine. There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...
The core red tribe does not believe this. The Chinese are dirty uncivilized commie barbarians, they’re even worse than democrats.
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But many of these institutions are suffering self inflicted wounds. It’s been obvious since I’ve been paying attention to news (starting in junior high) that the news “of record” was liberal to a fault, was generally secular, and that it was pro-LGBT (this was in mid 1990s so well before Woke). And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.
University was much the same way. Outside of extremely skill or maths heavy courses, you could just simply expect that ideas like social libertarianism if not outright celebration of degenerate if not destructive lifestyles, government control, generous welfare states, free college, free healthcare, and basically socialism. And so you eventually understand that these scholars are not disinterested Confucian scholars simply looking for knowledge. If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.
Agreed. The mainstream media is a joke - even "reputable" institutions like the NYT have very little interest in providing balanced coverage of things. What interest exists is generally from an older generation of journalists, who are aging out and being replaced by young zealous partisans. And by and large, people not only have no interest in fixing it, they don't even have interest in seeing the problem! See smug slogans like "reality has a liberal bias" - that sort of attitude is just not indicative of genuine intellectual honesty and willingness to see things from other points of view.
In fairness there were libertarians in the economics department where I went to college, so that does happen some of the time. I don't know how often, but it does at least seem that some academics do come out the way you describe.
And this is why those old institutions are no longer trusted by anyone under 50. Nobody under 50 cites a story on the NYT website as a truth claim, because they have known since they began to understand the concept of bias in reporting that NYT and similar news sites are Cathedral sources and will push The Narrative. Getting that trust back would obviously require admitting it, fixing it, cleaning house to prevent it, and begin writing the news as it’s actually happening and not twisting it.
That’s what rebuilding trust is — until tge problems that caused the lack of trust are dealt with, trust is gone.
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The problem is that studies like this make this harder. It's a cycle.
They do think they're smarter, but that's not all of their claim. Or they wouldn't find it so hard to grant that someone like Elon is smart.
It's that they are necessary, precisely because the bigotry and ignorance of the unsympathetic part of the populace can't be left unchecked. It's not only harmful to them, it disproportionately harms those America owes a blood debt. It hurts the marginalized the worst and, to steal a line, that's too serious a matter to be left up to the voters to decide themselves.
They know they are disliked by some, they expect it. But a) people always resist progress and b)those people are people who don't know about things like this.
It's much harder to climb down this sort of moral position than it is to admit you're not as certain about a purely technical matter. It's much harder to see the necessity.
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That's a wonderful hypothetical.
They seem to be coming around though!
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025
Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.
For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.
Is there one offering Russia and Iran as possible alternatives instead? I suspect Putin is slightly more popular than democrats among right wingers, the ayatollah in between democrats and xi, and and the CCP last of all.
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This might just be a measure of partisanship, though. Two years ago, would the results be different?
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This is an online poll.
The alternative was Trump, so it became a fargroup vs. outgroup question.
I really don’t see the left having much admiration for China, they’re too involved in religious repression of Muslim minorities and too ethnically-chauvinist for the social-and-not-economic left to find them appealing. There’s also the one-child policy legacy, widely understood as a policy that led to mass-murder of female infants and thus is seen as horrifically misogynist (it’s literally an example of the government controlling women’s reproductive rights!). I’m sure there’s some tankies somewhere who admire Mr. Xi, but they’re not mainstream.
If anything, “China is not trustworthy and can’t be allowed to grow in power” is the one foreign policy matter where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum in the US. See strong support for the Hong Kong protesters, spy balloon fiasco, scandals about Chinese students being spies, fear of a war over Taiwan, the CHIPs Act (that failed). There’s bipartisan support for a firm position against China and the progressive left has no interest in allying with them. I suspect if tensions over Taiwan ever went hot, left-wingers would be more likely than right-wingers to support war; it would be another Ukraine.
I know some grassroots right-wingers who’ve bought into the propaganda that Russia is some great haven for social conservatism, but I don’t know any left-wingers who believe China is anything but a repressive authoritarian regime. Unlike the Soviet Union, they don’t have the cover of limited information — when an elderly official was dragged out of a party meeting it was all over Twitter — and people on the ground who speak English like the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan can speak to how China’s actions threaten their freedom.
Plus, their regional dominance threatens Japan, and everyone in America seems to agree the Japanese are cool.
Conspicuous China hatred is a racially tinged deep red thing to me; it might have religious overtones(persecution of Chinese Christians) and almost certainly has fifties level anti communist paranoia.
Maybe conspicuous Chinese hatred is like that, but my point is that low-level suspicion and dislike is so ubiquitous that it's not conspicuous. Particularly when it's focused on the CCP and not Chinese people, as it almost always is.
I'm not really talking about "The Chinese eat dogs!!!" stuff, which I agree has a racial component. Though I do believe there's growing suspicion more broadly about Chinese attitudes towards animals after the China-sympathetic view of COVID's origins was that people in Wuhan were eating bats, and especially after reports that the Chinese government was mass-killing family pets of infected people.
(If you want to find the few tankies who like the Chinese government, find the people who would get mad at me using the acronym "CCP" and loudly insist it's actually the "CPC". It's the lowest tier of language policing, which is why you'll only find it among internet communists.)
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