Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
This week I’m at a family reunion in the Blue Ridge mountains, near the border between Georgia and Tennessee. Among the activities my kin and I have been engaging in are: hiking, white water rafting, and trying not to say the word “Trump.”
Three of my four siblings voted for Trump, as did, I gather, most of their children. And, as luck would have it, the one sibling who didn’t vote for Trump didn’t make it to this reunion. So, should red-blue political debate break out, I would fail to carry the day. However, I would not go down quietly, and everyone knows that. So, for the sake of family amity, we all avoid the trigger word.
Several years ago, in an issue of Mindful Resistance (the predecessor of this newsletter), I wrote that if someone had mentioned the word Trump at a family reunion of mine, ensuing events would have made the barroom shootout scene in Inglorious Basterds look like the opening scene of The Sound of Music. Now that Trump is out of office, things don’t feel that tense. But they feel tense enough to keep the conversation focused on the weather.
All of which is a segue to two points:
1) This issue of NZN isn’t going to feature an extended essay by me—since, after all, whitewater rafting and not saying ‘Trump’ are time consuming activities.
2) This issue of NZN will feature some material that is relevant to the red-blue tribalism that is famously tearing America, including some American families, asunder.
The material comes from a conversation I had with well known anti-Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg (founder of The Dispatch) and well known Trumpist gadfly Mickey Kaus (who joins the conversation in midstream). The conversation won’t go public for a week or two, but it’s available to paid newsletter subscribers as of today, along with some (cleaned up) transcript excerpts, below, that are relevant to the tribalism issue.
Like some other recent conversations on my podcast (with Ross Douthat, Matt Yglesias, David Corn), this one is in commemoration of bloggingheads.tv, the network that was founded by me and Mickey in 2005 and that, after several evolutionary twists and turns, has become sufficiently different from its ancestral form to warrant a new name; the bloggingheads YouTube channel has been officially rebranded as Nonzero, and so has the podcast feed (formerly known as the Wright Show) that carried all my bloggingheads podcasts.
The excerpts below begin with Jonah talking about standards of journalism that prevailed around the time Bloggingheads was founded and contrasting them with contemporary standards that he sees as intertwined with a “crisis of editorship.”
Jonah: If you were in journalism—the world of ideas and whatnot—and you were young and angry, you had to get past an internal gatekeeper who said, “Hey, you know, let's fix this. You don't have evidence to back this up. You don't have facts to back this up. You gotta make an argument. You gotta do reporting—whatever it is—you know, depending whether it's opinion or reporting.”...
And that ethos of responsibility—about being careful about what you say and how you say it in a responsible manner—I think that has shrunk dramatically. And a big part of the problem isn’t so much just social media, it's the whole sort of triumph of clickbait culture. That we've gotten into a mode where we—and cable news does this too—where we monetize dopamine hits. Where the essence of political combat is to make your own side really, really angry and to also make the other side really, really angry because negative attention from the other side is a way to get positive attention from your own side. And I think that's just an unhealthy way to have public discourse. The whole point of Bloggingheads in the beginning was to have serious people who have serious disagreements have a civil conversation where they air civil disagreement.
Bob: Yeah, and actually just to put in one ad for it—a little late now to promote it, now that it's gone—but it did have a civilizing effect in the sense that you could take two people who had written nastily about each other and put them face-to-face and they would have a little harder time being mean to each other. It was just an interesting effect.
Jonah: I think that's absolutely right. But now, basically, the culture of arguing with avatars is much more powerful. And I think it's fairly poisonous. There's still places to have [those kinds of conversations]. I think the rise of podcasts has been a generally very positive thing.
And there's still plenty of places to have discourse. It just doesn't dominate political attention and media attention. The headspace of people on the left and the right is so much more dominated by being angry. And I think that's a problem.
Bob: Well, the incentives, as you said, are there to be tribal. That's how you get attention. And you rise within your own tribe by, you know, misrepresenting the other tribe or at least taking the most extreme opinions expressed there and acting as if they're typical of that tribe and so on. There are all these bad effects. And, as you said, even the big media—partly because of all the fine-grained data they have about which headlines are getting clicks—they're deeply incentivized to play the same game.
So this is all tied in famously with political polarization. I mean, it is, to some extent, the same thing but not entirely. Do you think that the trend toward political polarization was well underway before it was abetted by the technology? Or do you see it as, in some sense, fundamentally a product of technology or what?
Jonah: Um, sort of like my point about Trump, I think a lot of these things were trends that got amplified and accelerated because of technology. I mean, we know—it's sort of a cliché to point this out at this point—but virtually every mass communication innovation, going back to the printing press, yielded sort of populist upheavals. You know, you don't get the Protestant Reformation without the printing press. And, contrary to some propaganda, there was a lot of nasty populist upheaval that came with the Protestant Reformation—and the Counter-Reformation. And the populous protests of the 1930s were driven largely by radio. And the violence and clashes that we saw in the 1960s were driven in no small part by television. And I think that, now, the rise of social media, and the instantaneity of it, puts all of that on steroids.
And the difference is we had time to adjust to the printing press. We had time to adjust to radio. We had time to adjust to TV. And the pace and acceleration of innovation in the social media space doesn't give our brains the kind of time it needs to sort of put these things in perspective. Maybe eventually we will be able to put this stuff in perspective and people will get rid of their TikTok and their Instagram and all that kind of thing. But, by that point, I have no confidence that we won't be having implants in our heads or getting all of our stuff fed into our glasses or whatever. And that part does worry me.
Bob: Yeah. It seems things are moving faster than ever technologically. I mean, you know, as for how long it used to take things to play out, that had an upside and a downside. One could argue that, among the kinds of after-effects—if not consequences—of the Protestant reformation, was the Wars of Religion, which went on forever—
Jonah: For a really long time, yeah.
Bob: —before Europe got itself under control. I hope we get this under control faster than that.
[At this point Mickey Kaus joins the conversation.]
Bob: So I had this conversation with Ross Douthat that hasn't posted yet [It has since been posted here]—one of these Bloggingheads memorial conversations—and he was saying that—kind of in contrast to the incentive structure presented by social media—the incentive structure in blogging was for serious, more or less honest intellectual engagement. Like, you had your adversaries and you were symbiotic with them in the sense of arguing with them in ways that got attention and driving traffic to each other, but the way it worked—for whatever reason—is that you actually did serious engagement with [them]. I mean, maybe because it was a sustained dialogue and they would take you to account if you presented a simplistic view of their argument—if you straw-manned them or something. But a number of people have said this—that, you know, they’re nostalgic because blogging was an era of serious engagement. Is that your [feeling] and, if so, who were your kind of symbiotic adversaries?
Jonah: I basically agree with that. Blogging was, I thought, a real advance on what came immediately before it, and was superior to a lot of what came after it. And, I don't know, I mean, I I had engagements—you know, things between me and Yglesias got nasty from time to time—but I had serious arguments with him. I had both strenuous arguments and strenuous agreement with Andrew for a long time. I'm sure Mickey and I went back and forth on something or other. Um, the guys at Washington Monthly and all of those places. And I agree that there was a certain sort of [sink] or swim debate kind of thing going, where if you didn't make good arguments, you got creamed for it. You know, you just got nailed from all quarters. And … I learned a lot. It sharpened me up.
…
Twitter basically reduces everything down to “takes”. Doesn't mean you can't have some interesting engagement. There's interesting things that happen on Twitter. But, Twitter—because it was so much better at the instantaneity part of it—at the sort of, you know, satisfaction of just jumping in right away, it just—we saw it at National Review. It was a huge problem where people didn't want to blog. They just wanted to engage on Twitter. And I think Twitter, probably more than anything else, killed blogging.
That said, right now I think, you know, The Dispatch is carried on Substack, but we're leaving Substack—and I have nothing bad to say about Substack—but I think that Substack in many ways is blogging 2.0. In that, if you actually look at the most successful people on Substack, they are disproportionately—I mean, I haven't looked recently—but at least last time I looked at it, it was just disproportionately people who had come of age in the blogging era. You know, it was Matt Yglesias and me and David French. The Dispatch has been the number one source of revenue on Substack since we launched, and I think it's a great platform for established writers with loyal followings. And that sort of level of engagement with readers that attracted a lot of people to blogging, you now find that more on the newsletter side of things.
[Later we got into a conversation about how the Democrats could probably win more elections by moving toward the center and that the same was true of Republicans. Then:]
Bob: To get back to the kind of long view we're taking generally in this conversation, we're just describing the dynamics of polarization. Where, you know, classic political theory is if you want to win the election, your candidate moves as close to the center as possible. But our politics now seem to preclude that on both sides.
Jonah: Yeah, and I have a long list of villains in this. I think primaries are terrible. I think part of the problem is Congress doesn't do its job. And so Congress is supposed to be the place where politics happens but, instead, politics is spilling out all over the place because it's not happening in Congress. I think [also] the balkanization of the media—we've gotten to a place where too many outlets think their job is to tell their audiences what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. And in an era of negative polarization, as long as you hate the other party enough, that's a qualification. And, um, it's a hot mess.
Bob: So how pessimistic are you, long run? I mean, you could mount an argument that there's no way out of the spiral. People have mounted that argument. And one version of that argument, I think, is that technology has so changed the context of our democracy, that you really would need to change some fundamentals about it—like at the constitutional level—to make it a representative democracy that functions even in this technological age. And yet, one thing the technology is doing is hamstringing the process so much that that just can't happen. You can't do coherent big picture change from within the system. That's one argument. But are you guys as pessimistic as people who make such arguments are?
Jonah: Long term, I'm not that pessimistic. I mean, I think at some point, look, there are a lot of problems that we have in this country in terms of politics which would be solvable by, you know, I would argue, getting rid of primaries—maybe some jungle primary reform kind of things if you want to do it that way instead. Umm, getting rid of cameras on Capitol Hill. I mean, it's hard for me to believe that those kinds of—I do believe that those kinds of things will go a long way to fixing a lot of our problems. And it's hard to believe, for me, that the country is going to fall apart at the seams but for not fixing those kinds of things.
I also think that there is a really robust capacity in America for self-correction and self-reform. The problem is—the downside is—that you gotta make mistakes to learn from them. What is it, Edmund Burke who says, “example’s the school of mankind and he will learn at no other”? So I think in the short-to-medium term, I think we're going to get more political violence. I think we're going to get more jackassery. But a lot of the stuff that we complain about has to do with the fact that there's a very small stratum of political tribes that are dominating political discourse. And I'm sort of a Herb Stein on this, you know: “that which cannot go on forever, must eventually stop”. And I still think this is a good and decent country. I don't think we're on the verge of civil war. I think we're on the verge of some really ugly stuff for a little while, and it makes me sad, but it doesn't make me despair.
Mickey: The only solution I can think of is somebody really charismatic, who sort of comes along and just beats the hell out of everybody and shows people that a sensible sort of, you know, “Cut the crap. Let's get down to business” attitude will win the day. And that person is Gavin Newsome!
No, it's not. I don't know who that person is. And if that person were on the scene, I would be touting him. But, somebody Kennedy-esque, with a little more substance maybe than Kennedy had.
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