A telling observation on tRump's liability as an all-powerful, irresistible force is his own crippling psychopathology, where the goal is simply rank submission without a "piece of the action", as it were. Hitler succeeded initially because those from whom he demanded total compliance also were given a "share" in the Nazi state, to cement their loyalty.
tRump, OTOH, has no use for quid pro quo bargaining, it's ALWAYS "give once, give again" — and again without surcease to demonstrate — to himself — "I'm the Boss, and I don't share", i.e. what's mine is mine, and what's yours is also mine.
Fails in the long run, eventually and sordidly...question is, for us in the US, how protracted will "the long run" be?
That's true in the physical sense, but he certainly has shared some insider trading knowledge. One look at Marjorie Taylor Greene's recent haul gives a good indication. And MuskRat is making out like a bandit - TE卐LA notwithstanding - with all those SpaceX contracts.
Have you read “Classical Greek Oligarchy” by Matt Simonton? His thesis is basically “struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems.”, focusing on the different ways oligarchies “jammed” the lines of communication between masses (preventing shared information from becoming common information), and the moment that broke down (when, for example, the assembled army starts booing the leader)
Exactly, and how well the Nazis employed *Gleichschaltung* ensured entire capture of the public and private spheres, documented so well by Richard J Evans and others.
Very influential on me and how I view democracy. Cannot recommend enough. I know he’s done some interviews if you want to listen to him talk, but I was really impressed by the book itself.
I've had a copy on my book shelf for at least five years, but haven't cracked it open. Now I will! A lot of the thoughts in this were also absorbed by osmosis from conversations with Seva Gunitsky, and from reading some of the modern authoritarianism literature (e.g. Milan Svolik) which has good insights into intra-authoritarian elite rivalries. But also, tbh, this was basically written in the space of a train ride from DC to Baltimore, which meant that I didn't do nearly as much as I should have to talk about the sources of the ideas (e.g. this is an indirect riff on some of the arguments in Adam Gurri's essay, which is linked, but the broader debt is not acknowledged).
Loved this And the fact that you wrote it on that train ride proves that the perfect is the enemy of the good. better to get it out there than to wait one of the points that resonates with me the most. is this finding of a common interest and this cessation of "Leopard-face-eating memes" that "may feel personally satisfying, but they are usually not great politics." I'd like to see all of us work towards figuring out that common interest is so that we have language that entices and engages
Would love to see what you think! That was my first systematic exposure to a lot of these ideas, but I know he was drawing on a long tradition (Hardin for sure gets cited)
The sniffy academic replies to your Bluesky post nearly caused my face to lock into a disgusted sneer cramp. As an example of how this all trickles down and gets real, our local arts & humanities council board just voted to ban DEI language on "public-facing documents" lest they lose federal funding for a mere 15% of their projects. Their excuses were pure distilled weasel, including the predicatable finger pointing: "based on a directive from the National Endowment on the Arts (NEA), which was ordered by the Trump administration to remove such language from its policies."
Well, they couldn't just come right out and say "This is the only way we can think of to survive at the moment. This administration is threatening to shut us down altogether."
Not that it's a good excuse or anything like that mind you, but I suspect that's their thinking.
A good reading of Hume, who featured in my early education for no apparent reason except to reappear successfully at this very moment. And a good takeoff into figuring out how to focus on unity rather than division.
Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, I once decided not too long ago to try out ChatGPT to see what all the hoopla was about. I prompted it with "What is the most effective way to preserve and restore democracy in an authoritarian regime?"
It gave surprisingly good answers. I'll just give the short list here, it also provided explanations.
1. Building Broad, Inclusive Coalitions (Indivisible, 50501, ThirdAct, Rise and Resist, Tesla Takedown, etc.)
2. Nonviolent Resistance and Civil Disobedience (April 19, be there or be square!)
3. International Solidarity and Support (we've been seeing this)
4. Establishing Independent Institutions (like the shadow cabinet we've been hearing about lately).
5. Promoting Defections Within the Regime (this might be tricky)
6. Strengthening Local and Grassroots Movements (again, Indivisible, 50501, ThirdAct, Rise and Resist, Tesla Takedown, etc.)
7. Creating a Vision for a Democratic Future
8. Leveraging Digital Tools and Social Media (like right here on substack!)
9. Economic and Institutional Reforms Post-Democratization
Wow, thank you for this. I've been worried about the lack of coordination. April 5 was such a smashing success, I somehow expected momentum. Yet, the Hands Off website hasn't been updated to reflect April 19.
The current conventional wisdom is that we need 3.5% of the population, about 12,000,000, to take to the streets. April 19 is just two days away now. We need all hands on deck, as there's the possibility of the Orange Scourge declaring Martial Law on Sunday.
“The problem faced by mass publics is different. For all the language about the ‘tyranny of the masses,’ they find it difficult to coordinate on rewarding friends and punishing enemies. That makes them less likely to go bad, at least in the way that tyrants can go bad. But it also makes it more difficult for them to coordinate against incipient tyranny, even when they know that everyone would be better off if they did. “
Our group is working on the creation of a database of public opinion for the purpose of measuring public opinion. It’s a coordination and collective action tool.
I don’t wanna throw a bunch of links up here and spam you guys if you’re not interested, but we believe it is the answer. I can guarantee this is nothing like you’ve ever heard of before.
If anyone wants more information, we will be happy to provide it.
Henry, could you please fix a confusing typo? (should be "us" not "is"),
"What we need to guide is(us) in coalescing with others is merely the evidence of sufficient leadership and sufficient members to make our joining them clearly beneficial.".
The version of this old Atlantic piece that I tried to read, a few hours ago, was excruciatingly - not so much wordy, as minutia-esque. Perhaps it was hacked.
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
A telling observation on tRump's liability as an all-powerful, irresistible force is his own crippling psychopathology, where the goal is simply rank submission without a "piece of the action", as it were. Hitler succeeded initially because those from whom he demanded total compliance also were given a "share" in the Nazi state, to cement their loyalty.
tRump, OTOH, has no use for quid pro quo bargaining, it's ALWAYS "give once, give again" — and again without surcease to demonstrate — to himself — "I'm the Boss, and I don't share", i.e. what's mine is mine, and what's yours is also mine.
Fails in the long run, eventually and sordidly...question is, for us in the US, how protracted will "the long run" be?
That's true in the physical sense, but he certainly has shared some insider trading knowledge. One look at Marjorie Taylor Greene's recent haul gives a good indication. And MuskRat is making out like a bandit - TE卐LA notwithstanding - with all those SpaceX contracts.
Have you read “Classical Greek Oligarchy” by Matt Simonton? His thesis is basically “struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems.”, focusing on the different ways oligarchies “jammed” the lines of communication between masses (preventing shared information from becoming common information), and the moment that broke down (when, for example, the assembled army starts booing the leader)
Exactly, and how well the Nazis employed *Gleichschaltung* ensured entire capture of the public and private spheres, documented so well by Richard J Evans and others.
The "Third Reich in Power" is great! Feels like watching a wrecking ball go through a society seven times in a row from different angles.
Very influential on me and how I view democracy. Cannot recommend enough. I know he’s done some interviews if you want to listen to him talk, but I was really impressed by the book itself.
I've had a copy on my book shelf for at least five years, but haven't cracked it open. Now I will! A lot of the thoughts in this were also absorbed by osmosis from conversations with Seva Gunitsky, and from reading some of the modern authoritarianism literature (e.g. Milan Svolik) which has good insights into intra-authoritarian elite rivalries. But also, tbh, this was basically written in the space of a train ride from DC to Baltimore, which meant that I didn't do nearly as much as I should have to talk about the sources of the ideas (e.g. this is an indirect riff on some of the arguments in Adam Gurri's essay, which is linked, but the broader debt is not acknowledged).
Loved this And the fact that you wrote it on that train ride proves that the perfect is the enemy of the good. better to get it out there than to wait one of the points that resonates with me the most. is this finding of a common interest and this cessation of "Leopard-face-eating memes" that "may feel personally satisfying, but they are usually not great politics." I'd like to see all of us work towards figuring out that common interest is so that we have language that entices and engages
Rise! Resist! ✊✊✊
April 19. Be there or be square!
Would love to see what you think! That was my first systematic exposure to a lot of these ideas, but I know he was drawing on a long tradition (Hardin for sure gets cited)
The sniffy academic replies to your Bluesky post nearly caused my face to lock into a disgusted sneer cramp. As an example of how this all trickles down and gets real, our local arts & humanities council board just voted to ban DEI language on "public-facing documents" lest they lose federal funding for a mere 15% of their projects. Their excuses were pure distilled weasel, including the predicatable finger pointing: "based on a directive from the National Endowment on the Arts (NEA), which was ordered by the Trump administration to remove such language from its policies."
Well, they couldn't just come right out and say "This is the only way we can think of to survive at the moment. This administration is threatening to shut us down altogether."
Not that it's a good excuse or anything like that mind you, but I suspect that's their thinking.
A good reading of Hume, who featured in my early education for no apparent reason except to reappear successfully at this very moment. And a good takeoff into figuring out how to focus on unity rather than division.
Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, I once decided not too long ago to try out ChatGPT to see what all the hoopla was about. I prompted it with "What is the most effective way to preserve and restore democracy in an authoritarian regime?"
It gave surprisingly good answers. I'll just give the short list here, it also provided explanations.
1. Building Broad, Inclusive Coalitions (Indivisible, 50501, ThirdAct, Rise and Resist, Tesla Takedown, etc.)
2. Nonviolent Resistance and Civil Disobedience (April 19, be there or be square!)
3. International Solidarity and Support (we've been seeing this)
4. Establishing Independent Institutions (like the shadow cabinet we've been hearing about lately).
5. Promoting Defections Within the Regime (this might be tricky)
6. Strengthening Local and Grassroots Movements (again, Indivisible, 50501, ThirdAct, Rise and Resist, Tesla Takedown, etc.)
7. Creating a Vision for a Democratic Future
8. Leveraging Digital Tools and Social Media (like right here on substack!)
9. Economic and Institutional Reforms Post-Democratization
Wow, thank you for this. I've been worried about the lack of coordination. April 5 was such a smashing success, I somehow expected momentum. Yet, the Hands Off website hasn't been updated to reflect April 19.
The current conventional wisdom is that we need 3.5% of the population, about 12,000,000, to take to the streets. April 19 is just two days away now. We need all hands on deck, as there's the possibility of the Orange Scourge declaring Martial Law on Sunday.
Helpful piece.
“The problem faced by mass publics is different. For all the language about the ‘tyranny of the masses,’ they find it difficult to coordinate on rewarding friends and punishing enemies. That makes them less likely to go bad, at least in the way that tyrants can go bad. But it also makes it more difficult for them to coordinate against incipient tyranny, even when they know that everyone would be better off if they did. “
Our group is working on the creation of a database of public opinion for the purpose of measuring public opinion. It’s a coordination and collective action tool.
I don’t wanna throw a bunch of links up here and spam you guys if you’re not interested, but we believe it is the answer. I can guarantee this is nothing like you’ve ever heard of before.
If anyone wants more information, we will be happy to provide it.
Coordination…
Very helpful - ALL of it!
Where might I find the credit for the illustrator?
Henry, could you please fix a confusing typo? (should be "us" not "is"),
"What we need to guide is(us) in coalescing with others is merely the evidence of sufficient leadership and sufficient members to make our joining them clearly beneficial.".
What's interesting is that inverting that text is a recipe for dissolution. Where are the good leaders and how do they show it?
Pairs nicely with this piece in the Atlantic about how tyrants face information problems because everyone is too scared to tell them the truth
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of-the-tyrant/302480/
The version of this old Atlantic piece that I tried to read, a few hours ago, was excruciatingly - not so much wordy, as minutia-esque. Perhaps it was hacked.
My god. I think what was written is correct but it could have and should have been stated in a much briefer fashion.
I have excellent news for you! Under our generous policies for aggrieved readers, you still have 28 days to apply for a full refund.
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
https://open.substack.com/pub/marketszoon/p/quants-of-politics?r=58uzcq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you for this informative reference...plays in nicely to the contemporary scene in America.