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An Emerging Values Consensus?

An Emerging Values Consensus?

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You might look at that title – “An Emerging Values Consensus” – and think, are you kidding?? The Culture Wars and the partisan divide between liberals and conservatives (or the blue zone and the red zone) have been a fixture in our society for decades now. I’ve already written a series of blog posts on the topic, in which I concluded that we were experiencing a “Red-Blue” identity crisis as a society. Which way will we break? Or could we even break into two – split into two societies altogether, possibly violently? There is serious discussion of impending civil war out there.

You’ve probably seen the above map before. It’s from the 2000 Presidential election, and shows the counties that voted for Bush in red and the counties that voted for Gore in blue. It’s around this time that the red zone-blue zone idea came about – the idea that there were two different “values camps” with competing visions of what America should be. Baby Boomers were in mid-life then, and their values-orientation dominated American culture. Their passion and moral zeal is what made the divide between the two camps so deep and so unbridgeable, damaging our political system to the point that many now wonder if it can be repaired. Just think of the events of January 6th this year to understand what I mean.

Back around that time, on an old fashioned web site that I built, I attempted to list out the differences between these two values camps. The list is a bit over-generalized, a bit stereotyped; I can’t deny it. I’m sure many people believe a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. But to some extent these differences do define the partisan divide, and the thing is, as the partisanship has just worsened and worsened, it’s gotten to the point that it doesn’t really matter what your particular “nuanced” belief system is. The political struggle has become existential, and you have to pick a side and stick with it.

Or not, I suppose. You could just not belong to either side. I have a feeling that many of my generation, Generation X, are in that particular “values camp.” It’s the camp of people who mind their own business and just want to be left alone. As the map below show, if non-voters counted in the electoral college (I know, that makes no sense) then “Nobody” would have been elected President in 2016.

This isn’t to say that non-voters lack values or moral beliefs, just that they might be having trouble finding a political party to fit into. As I already suggested, most people probably take their beliefs a little from the red side, a little from the blue side. It’s even possible to show that the country isn’t so starkly divided geographically as the “red zone-blue zone” maps suggest, by measuring both Republican and Democratic votes per county and constructing a “purple” spectrum map like the one below.

Red v. Blue spectrum version from the 2016 Presidential election.

All I’m trying to say here is that the neat division of values into two columns doesn’t necessarily reflect how people think. And now that Boomers are aging out of mid-life, being replaced by Generation X, moral righteousness as a guiding principal of politics is losing its shine. As I already blogged, Boomer moralism has rendered politics dysfunctional. Younger generations yearn for a practical approach to politics, one that can solve the many thorny problems facing our society. It is perhaps unfortunate, then, that the current mid-life generation, Generation X, which is known for pragmatism, also eschews politics.

I’m just rehashing what I’ve already written about before, so back to the title of this post and the idea of a values consensus. Assuming America is not going to split into two societies, we’re eventually going to settle for some version of “a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B” that works for the majority of us. This will grow more and more apparent as the morally righteous Boomers, who pretty much can’t ever have their minds changed, age out of public life. Those who disagree with these values, who reasonably can claim that there is no “consensus” since they disagree, will be relegated to the sidelines of public life. In fact, you can already see this happening. Isn’t that exactly what hashtag movements, cancel culture, de-platforming are all about? Effectively, if unfairly, enforcing a majoritarian viewpoint?

So what exactly is the consensus that is emerging? I actually tried to predict what it might be way back in 2002 when I first created the red values v. blue values page. Then I tried again and again around the time of the 2016 election. How exactly am I doing this? Well, my admittedly non-scientific approach is simply to monitor discourse on major platforms on the Internet to see what’s going on. I check the reddit hivemind, since I really do think that is the premier site where Millennials are forging a consensus using the tools of social media.

Now maybe this puts me in a bit of blue zone bubble, since all the red zoners are moving to alternate sites like Gab and Parler (so I’ve heard). But doesn’t the fact that red zoners are shifting to less mainstream platforms tell you which way the consensus is going? Honestly, I think there are only two areas where the red zone’s view still has traction, and that is in the two most contentious points of the Culture Wars – gun control and abortion rights.

So here’s where I think we end up:

  • Pro-gun rights
  • Pro-marijuana legalization
  • Equal rights for LGBTQ
  • “Counter-culture” mainstreamed (everyone has a tattoo these days)
  • Pornography accepted
  • Continued restrictions on abortion, though it will never be fully banned
  • Justice and police reform
  • Reform to improve the lot of lower economic classes, even if it’s “socialism”
  • Pro-environmentalism policies to deal with climate change
  • A path to citizenship for “dreamers,” but immigration otherwise limited
  • Acceptance of a multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious society, to the chagrin of White Christian Nationalists

So now that this Culture Wars crap is out of the way, can we end the filibuster already and get some Universal Healthcare?

The Red-Blue Identity Crisis

The Red-Blue Identity Crisis

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This will probably be my last political post for a while. I’ve been hashing out the Red-Blue partisan divide for many posts now since the last election cycle, and wanted to leave a final thought. With the attack on the U.S. Capitol nearly three months behind us, it feels to me like things are settling down. The partisan divide is still there, no doubt, but it seems the conflict has retreated to the shadows. I thought there might be further escalation following the January 6 riot, but now I’m not seeing it. This could just be because of my personal social media bubble, of course.

My last thought on this is that, if partisanship has hardened us to the point that the two political parties can’t possible work together, then politics truly has left the realm of policy debate and become entirely about group identity. This is not unprecedented and it could simply be part and parcel of life in a Crisis Era. So what our political conflict comes down to is a choice of identity for the United States of America. Are we a conservative, “traditional American” society, dominated by whites and Christians (the red zone)? Or are we a progressive, diverse society, accepting of all races, creeds, and orientations (the blue zone)?

Ask yourself: doesn’t this surely describe the choice faced in recent elections? What substantial policy differences have really been on the table, that are not framed in terms of these values differences?

And couldn’t other Crisis Era conflicts be described as identity crises? In the 1860s, Americans faced the choice of defining themselves as primarily agriculturalists dependent on slave labor, or as industrialist capitalists and abolitionists. In the 1770s, Americans faced the choice of defining themselves as loyalists to the King, or as patriots of an independent nation. The winners of the great conflicts of those eras determined the identity which prevailed.

So what we’re experiencing is an identity crisis, as we try to figure out as a society if we are going to let the red zone values regimes prevail, or the blue zone values regime. I see a parallel between our times and England in the Tudor era, which see-sawed between Protestant and Catholic identities under different monarchs. Bloody Mary’s reign was a Catholic interregnum between two Protestant regimes, just as Trump’s was a MAGA interlude between the progressive Presidencies of Obama and Biden.

And just as England emerged from its conflicts as a decidedly Protestant nation, I believe the United States will ultimately affirm itself as a blue zone nation. Why do you think the red zoners complain so much about the “mainstream media?” The blue zone, with its progressive identity, is the mainstream!

In the end, the Red State, already exiled from social media and the butt of joking memes, will be consigned to an “alt-” existence on the fringes of mainstream society. All that their politicians can do now is do their best to suppress the vote. But in the long run, they cannot prevail. They we will be left as troublemakers, and dissenters from the mainstream view.

Which isn’t to say that they will be entirely in the wrong or that the mainstream view will be ideal for society. That’s just the way we are headed right now, as far as I can tell. Of course, some major event could prove me wrong. But barring that, I don’t think I have much more blogging to do on this subject.

Subreddit of the week: murderedbyAOC

Subreddit of the week: murderedbyAOC

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Years back, I wrote a blog post about how Millennials use social media for consensus building. I was tying into predictions based on Strauss & Howe generational theory on how the Millennial generation would behave as young adults in this era, the Crisis Era. One prediction is that they will enforce a code of good conduct.

Prediction about Millennials from The Fourth Turning.

Fast forward to today, and cancel culture is fully in place. Well, what is “cancel culture” if not an effort to enforce a code of conduct by ostracizing those who violate the code?

It seems that complaints about cancel culture come mostly from the political right. But before you call it a phenomenon of the left, I challenge you to go to a right-leaning site like parler and express support for President Biden. I’ll bet you get “cancelled” pretty fast.

Could the right’s problem with cancel culture just come from the fact that the left has been more successful at it? Perhaps that is because the left’s code of conduct better reflect’s the majoritarian view. Perhaps that is because the left didn’t choose a champion who is a criminal mountebank.

found on /r/murderedbyAOC

Or maybe the left really is just better at the culture game. We all know from reddit that the /r/TheRightCantMeme. And look no further than reddit to find a Millennial who excels at enforcing good conduct with her brilliant wit.

I mean Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has her own subreddit, dedicated to reposting the stinging comebacks to red zoners that she makes on social media. It’s a happy little bubble for a blue zoner to go and assure themselves of the superiority of their partisan viewpoint. And as a partisan blue zoner myself, I’m happy to declare /r/murderedbyAOC the subrreddit of the week.

Subreddit of the Week: enlightenedcentrism

Subreddit of the Week: enlightenedcentrism

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There is a subreddit devoted to the idea that the claim “but both sides are doing it…” as some sort of above-the-fray stance of moderation is really aligning oneself with the extremist right. It’s called /r/enlightenedcentrism and it freely admits in a reminder on a pinned post that it is left-leaning.

An image taken from a post on /r/enlightenedcentrism.

I bring up this subreddit because I recently read the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” It’s authors argue that the Republican Party bears the greater responsibility for creating the partisan rift and for disrupting the functioning of government. It’s been their strategy since they started pushing against the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party, way back when conservative Baby Boomers entered politics. It’s part of their Ayn Rand-ian “no government is good government” agenda. The authors also argue that the problem has been exacerbated by the professional media’s inclination to attempt to report objectively, to treat both sides of the partisan divide fairly. This has obfuscated the truth that one side is deliberately being disruptive and causing damage to the democractic process.

Doesn’t this make sense of recent events surrounding the election of the new President, a Democrat? Let’s face it, being an enlightened centrist isn’t a useful option any more. As Dr. Maggie Gravel says at the end of Death to 2020, “pick a side and hunker down.” Either get on your Russian-hosted social media site with the other red staters and plot against the United States, or join the blue state and the mission of restoring the nation.

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Covidiots

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Covidiots

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I still sometimes see people out and about and not masked. I call them “death spreaders” and give them a very wide berth. There was a death spreader at the Post Office over the Christmas holiday. It was in much too close quarters for anyone to be unmasked and it pissed me off. It’s sad that this is still a problem, with the pandemic raging and the numbers just getting worse and worse.

When I first observed this phenomenom I called these people Covidiots. Their presence was ominous and invoked the feeling of being in an apocalyptic movie. How can it be getting worse?

We all know the real problem. The pandemic has been politicized. One side of the political divide believes the pandemic is a lie, just as they believe the election is a lie. And now the Covidiots are out on the streets, armed and dangerous, attacking democracy itself.

It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. So get ready for the final chapter in the trilogy, coming soon to a country near you.

Book Review: It’s Even Worse Than You Possibly Could Have Imagined

Book Review: It’s Even Worse Than You Possibly Could Have Imagined

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I just finished this quick read – It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. Here’s my review on goodreads:

The Boomer generation is one whose scholars and thinkers (and they are a thinking generation rather than a doing generation) tend towards pessimistic outlooks and dire prognostications. They are also the most politically destructive generation in living memory. The destructiveness the Boomers have wrought in American government is the subject of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”, a collaboration by two of their own chorts. While the book isn’t explicitly generational history, the story it tells, of government becoming increasingly partisan and conflict-oriented rather than coalitional and achievement-oriented, clearly coincides with the Boomers’ rise to political power.

The authors trace the beginnings of this trend all the way back to 1978, when Newt Gingrich first took office in the House of Representatives. Before reading this book, I had not realized how far back the inception of the Gingrich Revolution was, or how long it took to come to fruition. It was predicated on a strategy of confrontation and disruption, and of questioning the legitimacy of existing institutions: the Boomer modus operandi since the days of the student movements of the 1960s. By the time of the Obama administration, when this book was first published, the strategy enabled a Republican minority to hold the United States government hostage.

The fundamental problem which Mann and Ornstein diagnose is that parliamentary style political parties do not mesh well with a system of separate branches with checks and balances. A minority party can easily exploit one branch’s power to limit another’s and prevent any governing from happening at all. This suits the ideology of the Republican party, which holds that government is actually undesirable altogether, and their asymmetric use of this strategem against the Democratic party has defined politics in the United States in our time. Generation X politicians in the GOP, like the “Young Guns” of the 2008 election cycle, have been happy to take up the banner of obstructionism in the name of anti-government principles. This alliance between Boomer and Gen X conservatives has wielded considerable power, and clearly marks a generational shift in U.S. politics.

Again, the authors don’t explicitly make a generational point. What they do is break down the problem in terms of specific factors and offer some possible remedies. Foremost is improving voter participation and shifting away from winner-take-all electoral processes, which prevent moderate politicians from winning elections. Campaign finance reform is another possible remedy at the electoral level. At the institutional level, reducing the use of the filibuster to obstruct legislation and executive nominations is key. Finally, improving the culture overall is required, to restore public trust and recreate a sense of public space.

The authors released an edition in 2016 with the title updated to “It’s Even Worse Than It Was”; this is the edition I read. In the afterword, Mann and Ornstein acknowledge that nothing improved since 2011, that all the trends of hyperpartisanship and extremism and lack of compromise have worsened. And this was before Trump won the election; I can only guess that a third edition published now would be titled “It’s Even Worse Than You Possibly Could Have Imagined”. The disastrous inability of the government to address the Covid-19 pandemic clearly demonstrates the damage that the insurgent Republican party has done to our political system.

Overall this book is a quick and easy read, and an eye-opening work of political analysis. It explains the changes that have occurred in government since Boomers and Gen Xers have come to dominate in office, and how the confrontational style of parliamentary politics has rendered our constitutional system dysfunctional. It understands that restoring the functioning “normality” of the past, with parties that are adversarial but able to work together, will be difficult. Informed by generational theory, we must recognize that it will take future generations of politicians to get us there.

I’ll just add that, despite the pessimistic title I gave to this blog post, I feel like we might soon be over with this period of hyperpartisanship. I think the worst of the extremists are being discredited, and are being marginalized in the public sphere. Trump’s hopes of a coup of some sort are fading, and Trump supporters are heading for the shadows.

Obviously a lot is riding on the transition to the Biden administration and its first few months. Like all of us, I will watching intently to see if it finally starts getting better.

The Red-Blue Network-Centric Wars, or, Clash of the Media Bubbles

The Red-Blue Network-Centric Wars, or, Clash of the Media Bubbles

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In the late 1990s, with the Cold War just ended and the United States as the world hegemonic “sole superpower”, a new doctrine of warfare called network-centric warfare emerged. The gist of it: “use information networks to get an advantage.” It was an acknowledgement of the growing power of densely networked computers, such as the Internet which we take for granted today.

Meanwhile, a constitutional lawyer named Philip Bobbitt was writing his seminal book The Shield of Achilles, in which he argued that the constitutional order of the industrial nation state was giving way to a new order, which he called the informational market state. Securing opportunity and choice were the new functions of government, over providing welfare and solidarity.

Fast forward to 2020, and we are in the midst of Cold Civil War II, the battle between the red zone and the blue zone that I’ve been blogging about lately. The United States has abandoned the world stage, and is focused internally. A pandemic undermines the legitimacy of the new market state order, by both reducing economic opportunity and creating a public welfare imperative. And the power of the world wide computer network is something to be feared now; it lets bad actors, even foreign powers, manipulate public consciousness. Information runs amok and the Internet is a battlefield in a domestic war, with each side using the network to spread agitprop promoting its particular version of reality.

For example, in the red zone reality bubble, millions of votes cast for Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential election were fraudulent. Personally, I think that’s BS – if it were true, Trump’s lawyers would explicitly make the claim in court instead of only in media statements. But I am a partisan of the blue zone in this war, so how could my words carry any weight with a partisan of the red zone? It seems we’re at an impasse – and it shows in the paralyzation of our government.

The problem is, with each side convinced of the veracity of its version of the truth, how is the consumer-citizen of the informational market state supposed to know which version is correct? If we are a really in a state, as Bobbitt argues, where we can choose from a menu of informational realities – will that be facebook, or parler, sir? – then how could we ever function as a polity? We need some common ground to stand on.

I am reminded of the time of the French Revolution, when rumors spread readily and people on either side easily believed the worst about the other faction. It was a mindset that pushed the people of that time to extremes of violence. I worried about this earlier in a book review. No, they didn’t have the Internet then, but that’s beside the point. An information network is there, regardless of the technology in use.

Ultimately, the chaos and violence of the French Revolution opened a path for an autocratic ruler to emerge and restore order. The people of the time were just glad for extremists on either side of the partisan divide to be put down. The moderates prevailed, but only because an authoritarian silenced the mobs. Trump might have been like Napolean and achieved this…but as it turned out, he didn’t.

I think the willingness of people to ensconce themselves in their media bubbles and stick with their partisan “zone” reflects a strong need for a consensus narrative, for a sense of collective purpose. We just need that purpose not to be at odds with the vision of a major segment of the populace within our same society. Maybe the United States is paying a price for becoming the sole superpower: there is no external power to unite us, as there was in the last crisis, so we’re left to fight each other. 9/11 might have been like Pearl Harbor…but as it turned out, it wasn’t.

So how will the center hold now? I honestly can’t say, but I suspect we’ll find out in the months to come. This will probably be my last red-vs-blue post for awhile, until some major change breaks. Meanwhile, I certainly will be watching my media bubble feeds with trepidation.

World Views on the Web

World Views on the Web

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This is to follow up on my last post, where I revisited some Boomer generation founded web sites that were arguably cutting edge “new media” a decade or so in the past, but by now are being submerged by the flood of traffic to social media sites where everyone hangs out today. These Boomer sites are quite clearly split between “red zone” (conservative / traditional / Republican) vs. “blue zone” (liberal / progressive / Democrat) values.

I ended the post by speculating whether the same stark difference would be evident in the web sites founded by younger generations. On the one hand, younger generations aren’t as values-driven as the Boomer generation. On the other hand, they primarily derive their Weltanschauung from the vision of the Boomers, and so that vision should be reflected in their own culture.

Revisiting the sites which I had linked to back in 2014, my impression is that the sites decidedly shift from red to blue as you go from Gen-X to Millennial. However, I would say that the Gen-X red zone sites are less hysterically partisan than the Boomer ones. I mean, Matt Drudge is really a muckraker at heart, not a partisan conservative.

Here’s the list roughly in order from the oldest founder (Newsmax’s Christopher Ruddy, born 1965) to the youngest. Only the founders of Reddit are Millennials; the rest are Gen-Xers. In my judgment there is a shift from the red zone world view to the blue zone world view as you go down the age ladder.

This is true even though the site at the bottom, reddit, accomodates people of all views, in assorted safe spaces called subreddits. They are safe spaces because the admins of the subreddits can ban people who express opposing viewpoints. But, in my judgment at least, the majoritarian perspective on reddit is the blue zone perspective. You can judge for yourself by visiting the sites.

The Old New Media

The Old New Media

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Ages ago (2014), on my rickety old Web 1.0 site which I still maintain, I published a list of prominent web sites by generation. The idea was to show how different generational archetypes produce different kind of content. The gist of it: Boomers make stuff that is ideological and righteously free-thinking, GenXers like sarcasm and muck-raking, and Millennials create consensus-building groupthink sites. The premier examples are probably HuffPost, The Onion and reddit, respectively.

Since it’s been a few years now, I thought I’d revisit the older sites, just the ones from the “Boomer” category. See if they’re still up and running. Consider that when they were created, ten or twenty years ago, these sites were cutting edge “new media.” Their Boomer founders were pioneers in a new form of communication. Now that social media has taken off, old fashioned web sites are losing influence (everyone’s going to “Parler” I hear).

As it turns out, all of the sites I originally listed are still up. I put them below, grouped into “red zone” and “blue zone.” The selection is somewhat arbitrary and I don’t feel like hunting more web sites down. It’s my little non-scientific study, but the sample size is enough to show how the red and blue zones really are in different reality bubbles. Two entirely different narratives of what is going in the U.S., particularly in regards to the election.

The Boomers, the Prophet generation in Strauss & Howe terms, is the generational archetype that rules over vision and values. So it makes sense that their cultural artifacts reflect these two dominant visions. But what about the web culture of the younger generations? Is it also split between these two visions? You can follow the other links to judge for yourself. One thing I’ll say is that so long as the Boomers, the values leaders, persist in their competing visions, we will probably remain as two separate generational constellations.

RED ZONE

BLUE ZONE

The Red-Blue Wars: Holding the Line

The Red-Blue Wars: Holding the Line

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I’m going to keep going with the “Red-Blue Wars” posts I’ve been doing. It feels like there is nothing else to write about at this moment. As I sit here anxiously watching the results from this absolute nail-biter of an election, I just want to go back to the first post in the series, which was about the “generational constellation” – the arrangement of generational archetypes in their respective phases of life during a social era.

The Crisis Era generational constellation is what creates the sense of tension and urgency, as well the feeling of solidarity, as society faces the threat of the crisis. It’s clearly evident in the massive, record-breaking support that each candidate in the election has received, as well as in the fact that the supporters on each side won’t back down. As The New Yorker put it, “Trump, despite the catastrophes of his rule, has retained the loyalty of the vast majority of red America.” This is to be expected in a Fourth Turning, or Crisis Era. People will stick by their leaders even when they fail, because that is the only hope for progressing an agenda.

Now if only each side of the partisan split didn’t perceive the main crisis threat to be – the other side. Clearly we have to figure out how to work together, and I am starting to see opinion makers shifting to that perspective. It’s the only way we can get to a true civic regeneracy.

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From the New York Times Twitter account, 11:12 AM · Nov 4, 2020