Lyons' is yet another critique of the open society that makes two typical and fundamental errors:
-- treating nations as natural communities when in fact they are made-up, arbitrary, fake nonsense
-- treating life under the "strong gods" as something other than the impoverished, repressive, hideous horror that the premodern world in fact was
There are real and serious problems with open, globalized modernity and you describe many of them well. But one cannot take seriously those who valorize fake history and fake community.
"treating nations as natural communities when in fact they are made-up, arbitrary, fake nonsense"
Pray tell, what community is authentic then? Only humanity? Good luck with that. Nations are created deliberately by the people who wish them to be born and are sustained by the people who wish to sustain them. The same could be said for buildings, roads, or farms. Does the fact that they are creations of the human mind and will make them any less real than the material creations of humanity? Is a tree more real than a house? What are you even talking about?
Nations are families writ large, and the immediate evolutionary problems of scaling come to mind. To fix this, we'll need serious superminds. AI is coming, bless its heart.
We are moving to Florida this summer. It seems pretty clear to me that Red America is building all the time. They build houses. The build high speed rail. They get internal migrants. Red America is going to gain an entire swing state from Blue America in the next census alone.
Red America also achieved perhaps one of the most important breakthroughs, universal school choice. That was a big reason for our move to Florida. Red America is taking serious steps to rein in its managerial class.
The federal government is an insurance company backed by an army. It doesn't build anything. It writes checks and occasionally gets in peoples way. State and local governments build things, when they want to and the Feds don't stop them.
The role of Trump is to destroy the federal government. To keep it from interfering with Red America.
These are good points, however, as I read it, the "Trump doesn't build" critique is not about actual houses or rails, though important those may be. Instead the argument is centered on the (underdeveloped in this essay) belief that building must include building social and community bonds, not merely production capacity and consumption avidity.
Production and consumption may indeed increase under Trump (if the tariff policy gets reversed), but for now the movement appears fundamentally uninterested in directing people to community service, charitable giving, and other activities that create meaning and preserve wellbeing for the giver and receiver. In this regard, it fails any claim that it restores a historical sense of nation or religious community. Trump himself exemplifies this separation from communal obligation, happily doing photo-ops with religious leaders but remaining uninfected by the things those leaders profess.
This is the part of the essay that rings most true, that Trump and his movement are symptoms, not foundational causes.
I don't think anyone who voted for Trump thought he was Ned Flanders.
To be fair actual Ned Flanders types, like Mitt Romney and GWB (at least in public), turned out to be real disasters and basically hated their voters.
As someone that is involved in a church community there are dangers in the Ned Flanders archetype, they often want to follow a script more than get things done. They are so deadly afraid of not being "nice" and they are easily steamrolled by bad actors. A lot of these people totally collapsed during the wokeness era, and none would have endured through what Trump endured (do you imagine Ned Flanders getting up and saying Fight Fight Fight!).
Here's what I know. Here in Blue America the private christian school we attended is infinitely better than the public schools around here (despite being blue ribbon rich suburb schools). The public schools emerged out of COVID with more money despite lower enrollment and a dismal track record everyone hates. The private school has had to move around because mortgage rates are up and they couldn't secure a permanent location on their budget. In short, bad performance is rewarded with more funding around here and it's hard to compete when you start in a massive hole versus the competition.
In Florida private school enrollment is exploding. It can actually be hard to get into a private school these days. They can't expand and start up fast enough. Turns out that when you even the playing field good results are rewarded.
I get excited by things like Trump dismantling the Department of Education. It's one less federal entity there to interfere with my education choices and screw up education training and credentialing. Dismantling the DoE used to be in every conservative think tanks policy papers, until someone did it and all of a sudden the people you go to parties in DC with are losing their jobs (I'm moving from the DC area). Then it turns out the only allegiance you ever really had was to your fellow managerial class. Hearing these people whine about their gravy train being shut off is so off-putting.
At least outside the US, rIghtwing "populism" is mostly bigotry against minorities and particularly asylum seekers, spread widely across social classes, though negatively correlated with education. Most wealthy countries are already post-Christian, and not too worried about the decline of "strong gods". But economies are doing well in various respects, adn people are, as they always have been, happy to blame immigrants for just about everything.
Respectfully I think this misrepresents Adorno and Popper's influence and Popper's key point.
"Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno..."
They were not hugely influential. Popper more do than Adorno who was a marginal figure - in the Anglo Saxon intellectual world he was at best a sideshow. Even amongst the thinkers of the Frankfort School he was far from the most influential thinker. To be honest I found the claim that Adorno, "set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades" to be fantastic.
Popper introduced the sexy meme of the open society but what this meant is frequently misunderstood. His key point was that given the shortcomings of any system of government and the failings of those doing the governing the absolutely critical dimension of any virtuous system of government was that the government of the day could be replaced. Any other system was one or other form of tyranny.
He certainly discussed the shortcomings of various modes of government over the ages but these shortcomings were what led him to prize the possibility of replacing a regime so highly.
Having made note of the above minor quibbles - imho your core point is absolutely correct
Lyons pinning the social change he is analysing on Popper is ridiculous.
And 'strong gods' is a dangerous home brew precisely because it is so hard to control and those who ride on its back are typically so hard to control or replace.
I'm with you that mass affluence is the root cause not some kind of reaction to the horrors of the World Wars.
I guess I'm not surprised that a certain kind of conservative is only conversant with American and European history but you only have to look further afield and see how much "it was WW2" fails to explain while "mass affluence" continues to hold explanatory water.
Did the strong gods die in South Korea and Taiwan because of WW2? In Vietnam and Thailand and South Africa and Mexico? In New Zealand and Indonesia? In Chile and Argentina and Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates?
It's pretty hard to make a story for how that all works based on what happened in Europe. It's a global issue and the only actual, truly global event we've seen in the rise of modern consumer driven mass affluence.
The true application of the 'Paradox of Tolerance' would see the Herbert Marcusian ideas of 'Repressive Tolerance' and cancel culture, the ones that are not tolerated.
Lyons' is yet another critique of the open society that makes two typical and fundamental errors:
-- treating nations as natural communities when in fact they are made-up, arbitrary, fake nonsense
-- treating life under the "strong gods" as something other than the impoverished, repressive, hideous horror that the premodern world in fact was
There are real and serious problems with open, globalized modernity and you describe many of them well. But one cannot take seriously those who valorize fake history and fake community.
"treating nations as natural communities when in fact they are made-up, arbitrary, fake nonsense"
Pray tell, what community is authentic then? Only humanity? Good luck with that. Nations are created deliberately by the people who wish them to be born and are sustained by the people who wish to sustain them. The same could be said for buildings, roads, or farms. Does the fact that they are creations of the human mind and will make them any less real than the material creations of humanity? Is a tree more real than a house? What are you even talking about?
Nations are families writ large, and the immediate evolutionary problems of scaling come to mind. To fix this, we'll need serious superminds. AI is coming, bless its heart.
We are moving to Florida this summer. It seems pretty clear to me that Red America is building all the time. They build houses. The build high speed rail. They get internal migrants. Red America is going to gain an entire swing state from Blue America in the next census alone.
Red America also achieved perhaps one of the most important breakthroughs, universal school choice. That was a big reason for our move to Florida. Red America is taking serious steps to rein in its managerial class.
The federal government is an insurance company backed by an army. It doesn't build anything. It writes checks and occasionally gets in peoples way. State and local governments build things, when they want to and the Feds don't stop them.
The role of Trump is to destroy the federal government. To keep it from interfering with Red America.
These are good points, however, as I read it, the "Trump doesn't build" critique is not about actual houses or rails, though important those may be. Instead the argument is centered on the (underdeveloped in this essay) belief that building must include building social and community bonds, not merely production capacity and consumption avidity.
Production and consumption may indeed increase under Trump (if the tariff policy gets reversed), but for now the movement appears fundamentally uninterested in directing people to community service, charitable giving, and other activities that create meaning and preserve wellbeing for the giver and receiver. In this regard, it fails any claim that it restores a historical sense of nation or religious community. Trump himself exemplifies this separation from communal obligation, happily doing photo-ops with religious leaders but remaining uninfected by the things those leaders profess.
This is the part of the essay that rings most true, that Trump and his movement are symptoms, not foundational causes.
I don't think anyone who voted for Trump thought he was Ned Flanders.
To be fair actual Ned Flanders types, like Mitt Romney and GWB (at least in public), turned out to be real disasters and basically hated their voters.
As someone that is involved in a church community there are dangers in the Ned Flanders archetype, they often want to follow a script more than get things done. They are so deadly afraid of not being "nice" and they are easily steamrolled by bad actors. A lot of these people totally collapsed during the wokeness era, and none would have endured through what Trump endured (do you imagine Ned Flanders getting up and saying Fight Fight Fight!).
Here's what I know. Here in Blue America the private christian school we attended is infinitely better than the public schools around here (despite being blue ribbon rich suburb schools). The public schools emerged out of COVID with more money despite lower enrollment and a dismal track record everyone hates. The private school has had to move around because mortgage rates are up and they couldn't secure a permanent location on their budget. In short, bad performance is rewarded with more funding around here and it's hard to compete when you start in a massive hole versus the competition.
In Florida private school enrollment is exploding. It can actually be hard to get into a private school these days. They can't expand and start up fast enough. Turns out that when you even the playing field good results are rewarded.
I get excited by things like Trump dismantling the Department of Education. It's one less federal entity there to interfere with my education choices and screw up education training and credentialing. Dismantling the DoE used to be in every conservative think tanks policy papers, until someone did it and all of a sudden the people you go to parties in DC with are losing their jobs (I'm moving from the DC area). Then it turns out the only allegiance you ever really had was to your fellow managerial class. Hearing these people whine about their gravy train being shut off is so off-putting.
Interstate Highway System? FEMA? Social Security? FDA?
really, really good
At least outside the US, rIghtwing "populism" is mostly bigotry against minorities and particularly asylum seekers, spread widely across social classes, though negatively correlated with education. Most wealthy countries are already post-Christian, and not too worried about the decline of "strong gods". But economies are doing well in various respects, adn people are, as they always have been, happy to blame immigrants for just about everything.
Respectfully I think this misrepresents Adorno and Popper's influence and Popper's key point.
"Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno..."
They were not hugely influential. Popper more do than Adorno who was a marginal figure - in the Anglo Saxon intellectual world he was at best a sideshow. Even amongst the thinkers of the Frankfort School he was far from the most influential thinker. To be honest I found the claim that Adorno, "set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades" to be fantastic.
Popper introduced the sexy meme of the open society but what this meant is frequently misunderstood. His key point was that given the shortcomings of any system of government and the failings of those doing the governing the absolutely critical dimension of any virtuous system of government was that the government of the day could be replaced. Any other system was one or other form of tyranny.
He certainly discussed the shortcomings of various modes of government over the ages but these shortcomings were what led him to prize the possibility of replacing a regime so highly.
Having made note of the above minor quibbles - imho your core point is absolutely correct
Lyons pinning the social change he is analysing on Popper is ridiculous.
And 'strong gods' is a dangerous home brew precisely because it is so hard to control and those who ride on its back are typically so hard to control or replace.
I'm with you that mass affluence is the root cause not some kind of reaction to the horrors of the World Wars.
I guess I'm not surprised that a certain kind of conservative is only conversant with American and European history but you only have to look further afield and see how much "it was WW2" fails to explain while "mass affluence" continues to hold explanatory water.
Did the strong gods die in South Korea and Taiwan because of WW2? In Vietnam and Thailand and South Africa and Mexico? In New Zealand and Indonesia? In Chile and Argentina and Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates?
It's pretty hard to make a story for how that all works based on what happened in Europe. It's a global issue and the only actual, truly global event we've seen in the rise of modern consumer driven mass affluence.
Based on the global North? Christianity? Capitalism unchained? Arbitrary nations?
Y'all need to get out more...
I agree with this.
The true application of the 'Paradox of Tolerance' would see the Herbert Marcusian ideas of 'Repressive Tolerance' and cancel culture, the ones that are not tolerated.