One small quibble: Xi did not crack down on Hong Kong because there was unrest there. Xi introduced massive changes to the Hong Kong system and the people reacted with unrest.
I see your point, but I guess I'm remembering Hong Kong's political arrangements and the prosperity it underpinned as being implicitly perceived by the CCP as "unrest", inasmuch as it was a challenge to Xi's authority.
You seem truly depressed. Perhaps an alternative point-of-view.... we are in the golden age of mankind.... in general, people are wealthier, more powerful, and healthier than at any time in history. On Trump and Trumpism, it seems to be a reaction to long neglected problems and current orthodoxies/priesthoods
1) MAHA: was the previous system, especially in the US, promotive to health. Poking a bit in this direction seems to make sense. I don't mind the debate on this important topic. We are headed towards a world of health ownership by the individual (vs doctors).
2) Shared Defense: A bit more shared investment in defense seems like a good thing. I can certainly understand the irritation to the European rhetoric of 6-week vacations/full healthcare.
3) Shift of focus from Europe to Americas: Obviously, what happens in your neighborhood impact you way more than some far off place. Mexico is far more important to the US than anyone in Europe.
4) Education/Research: again... was the current system really working... poking a bit at reforming it makes a lot of sense. Education/Research has been a huge success and that success has bred arrogance and a lack of willingness to adapt.
5) revenue mix: Shifting the federal revenue mix from primarily income tax to some level of sales tax (tariffs), fees (everywhere), and using the US government balance sheet ... it is an interesting experiment.
Overall, I think the problems being "poked" are the right ones. Are the solutions proposed the right ones, I have my doubts, but a little experimentation is not a bad thing. The political opposition would be wise to directly address these topics as well. On governance, we do need to close the loophole of "taxation without representation" with the tariffs. Trump seems to have found a loophole which he is exploiting... I guess from years of practice in real estate.
Finally, on Russia, I just wonder if the Ukraine war is actually a process of "de-fanging" a very negative influence in the world. On China, they are navigating a massive number of problems (demographics, debt crisis, massive increase in defense spending, etc). Even their successes (EV as an example) have deep issues with profitability. Buffett just disinvested from BYD. Over the last 50 years, the world has built a dependency on low-cost, low-margin, dirty industries from China. As they try to leverage that "strength," alternatives will be built. It might get a little rough in the transition, but nothing prevents the movement elsewhere.
Overall, there is a lot of churn, but the world is not a bad place.
Disagree with the common defense of Trump. It’s not enough to pick the right problems, that’s the easy part! Your solutions have to be good too. Any policy by anyone can be justified with a “but the status quo wasn’t great either”, but there’s lots of disastrous policies.
We “poked” the Middle East quite a bit with the whole Iraq thing, for example. Mao and Stalin poked some very real problems in their countries.
fair enough. I am not a Trump supporter..I could do without all the drama. It would be nice if the democrats addressed the right problems. The party seems lost. looking for a real debate on these important issues with reasonable alternatives.
Many Americans like yourself also don't quite know what the Democrats are about. Which is mainly because they lack the 24/7 influence machine benefiting the GOP in the form of FOX News, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair, and RW talk radio.
A "reasonable debate" over the future of healthcare makes sense, yes? The current federal shutdown, for example, is because the Democrats want to prevent health insurance premiums rising by 100-200% over the next calendar year. If you take away insurance from the bottom 10-20% of Americans, who do you think will reimburse hospitals when they show up for care and are unable to pay?
Well... I don't listen to any of the GOP or Conventional news sources...
On healthcare, you are referring to ACA subsidies... fair enough.. I am ok with this subsidy... in the short term. However, this is not a serious conversation on healthcare because it is only about insurance. Today, the healthcare system is this massive beast with little transparency with costs going out of control. A real debate would be: 1) what causes bad health ? 2) how do we reach an accommodation between the individual/society on encouraging good health ? 3) if you insist on doing things which cause bad health, do I have to pay for it ? 4) how do we reform compensation to be more transparent 5) etc...
A serious debate would go after the core underlying issues and suggest ways of addressing them.
Rahul agree with most of your post, especially with the Democrats, I am one, addressing issues. The PBS show Uncommon Knowledge, recently had a show with three historians, including Stephen Kotkin and Niall Ferguson. Excellent show and Niall echoed many of points. It was a fascinating show if you are interested.
Actually that show devolved into an unruly shouting match among three ego-centric historians, each absolutely sure of the rightness of his own position and interpretation. It said more about them than about whatever reality actually exists.
" in general, people are wealthier, more powerful, and healthier than at any time in history”
One has to ask how well that quotation would play out in Russia, Ukraine, many areas in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America, China, the Middle East, and a number of other places around the world including Appalachia and a number of other both rural and inner-city areas in the United States.
What is actually the case is that there are certainly substantial pockets of those who are wealthier. more powerful, and healthier, but the discrepancies between those that are and those that are not are rather a testament to a world which does indeed have the resources to make your description a reality, but in which those discrepancies are growing. One proof of that is the enormous number of refugees seeking asylum all across Europe and in the Americas, numbers that are destabilizing a number of those countries to which so many are fleeing.
Further, we are closer to nuclear war than we’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. World-wide saber-rattling is increasing rather than decreasing.
We have just recovered from a world-wide pandemic that, in addition to the millions it killed, also severely disrupted the world-wide supply chains in this increasingly interconnected world. Yet even here in the county you claim to so well served by Education/Research, the US, a leader in both, both are being decimated by the authoritarian polices of anti-intellectualism, revenge, and health cranks who seem to want to take us back to the last century.
You say that “A little experimentation is not a bad thing", and I would agree if the experimentation was not devolving into an all out war on the democratic process across the world.
Do we have problems all across the world? Of course we do. We always have had. But the solution is not to disdain, threaten, and overturn the alliances that combined to defeat the greatest evil in human history less than a century ago. It is not to disdain, disavow, and in some cases reverse the educational, technical, medical, and social progress made, however falteringly following the two greatest man-made catastrophes in human history (1914-18 and 1937-45). It is not to turn the world into warring camps armed with the potential to ‘solve' all our problems by entirely doing away with us or returning us to a radioactive Stone Age.
Ever since ‘the kingship descended from Heaven’ in ancient Sumer. strongmen (an a few women) leaders have been turning their powers to self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of wealth and power, suppression of political opposition, and territorial expansion through various means of economic, social, and military aggression. It is one of the oldest stories in what we call ‘civilization’.
The United States was created as an alternative to four millennia of top down rule, some of it relatively benign, some unimaginably cruel, most somewhere in between, but but all based on some variation of either ‘the divine right of kings’ or ‘our political, financial, and/or military success entitles us to make all the decisions for everybody else’.
Our alternative (Novus Ordo Seclorum) has been stumbling along for nearly 250 years, and across the world that alternative has been a beacon to many who have attempted, with varying degrees of success to emulate it, and it remains, as one of the best of us once noted, “the last best hope of earth”.
We are just under three weeks away from the anniversary of Lincoln’s extraordinary reiteration of that alternative on a cold November day at the site of the greatest battle ever fought on the American continent - coincidentally (or perhaps not) just days after the public debut of Ken Burn’s documentary on the American Revolution.
The fact that the 250th anniversary of our alternative will be overseen by a President who has no concept of what we were founded to become, nor any concern to maintain this, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted, is perhaps, one of the greatest ironies in our history.
I am curious about this part of the post: "a lot of leaders are looking eerily like Putin — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel being classic examples." How does Netanyahu resemble Putin? Israel has historically been surrounded by and attacked by real enemies bent on its elimination. Putin has trumped up imaginary threats in order to start multiple wars of expansion and conquest. Israel citizens have rights and freedoms, and can vote, (even their sizeable Arab population). Russia is highly repressive and Putin murders his political enemies.
It's true that Arab Israelis can vote. But that alone doesn't get you very far. Northern Irish Catholics had always been able to vote. But until the power sharing executive was introduced they were second class citizens in virtually every other respect - employment, housing, civil rights - just like Arab Israelis are. This is the fate of minority ethnic-religious communities within countries beleaguered by neighbouring states of the same ethnic-religious group.
The idea that the 17th century mirrored the 20th century in many ways is not new. In 2011 the historian Geoffrey Parker published “Global Crisis,” a book which makes that claim. History doesn’t repeat itself, so it’s not possible to know whether the current trend toward authoritarianism will be succeeded by an Age of Enlightenment, as the 18th century turned out to be. But, at least the fact that a historical parallel to our present predicament ushered in its wake a positive outcome should be a cause for hope.
Is this the opening crawl of the film you are proposing?
Tech, the global revolutionary force, has freed information, threatened the elites, and disrupted the social order. Autocrats arise, and with all the apparatus of the state at their disposal, use repressive force to bring back order. A small band of tech geniuses..yada yada yada.
Somehow casting tech as the hero just isn't working for me anymore, Noah.
That's not an immutable characteristic of AI—it's simply a matter of the material that the AI is trained on and the parameters that are set for it. When Musk Wanted to remove the leftist slant of Grok he ended up with something that was instantaneously pro-Nazi. Trump is now trying to influence the slant of mainstream media and maybe he'll go after AI as well.
I would argue it is an immutable characteristic of AI as a viable commercial product. It's so expensive to run it needs a huge consumer and business customer base.
You can keep something acceptable as a commercial product by simply keeping it bland and vanilla. One AI product that I have used refused to answer any question in 2024 that was “election related" according to that product's categorization. I seldom use this product.
I still think you overestimate the love people in the West actually hold for democracy. When push comes to shove voters have shown a deep indifference towards institutions and the country we've built. I don't think most voters understand it. I am not a huge Thaddeus Stevens fan, but I have a lot of empathy for that scene in Lincoln where he and the President are arguing and he looks at the President and says "you know what the people are" because he's right: the people are not as enlightened as we'd like to believe.
Amusingly the same actor offers another wonderful insight in a separate movie (Men in Black of all movies): "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Yep, Tommy Lee Jones was not my pick for calling our current calamity (and in many ways this doesn't 'call' it) but I find myself thinking of both lines.
AI by definition is the probabilistic middle ground. When we had far fewer media outlets, those few outlets had to target a broad range of opinions and diluted extreme opinions. It's quite possible that AI, as a media aggregator and reporter, can play that same part
Of course, there's a lot of caveats there - especially around accuracy and hallucinations. Also, the average of mass misinformation on the internet (which could also be generated from AI) would end up being just as bad. And it would be very easy to train a model on propaganda.
...but if there ever was a way out of rage-bait social media, responsible AI is probably it.
Suppose you have ever done one of those two-day retreats on decision making and taken part in the Life Raft scenario or crashed plane with survivors in the Canadian wilderness. In those cases, you come to understand that collective decision-making is better than singular decision-making.
I’m thinking that the lower GDP is a function of singular decision-making, which turns out to be less productive. As long as mercurial humans exist, we’ll have cults of power; as long as certain leaders have people willing to kill opponents, we’ll have dictators with crappy economies.
I do have a take on how populists arise and get elected. It is not social media, that is just an effective tool. Change is what is causing the dislocation that acts as a siren song for populists.
Change that never happens or change that happens too rapidly causes humans' dislocation. Rapid economic change has rendered vast swaths of the Midwest deserts for economic opportunity. Young people would not move to Silina, KS, or North Platte, NE, for job opportunities.
The young want both economic opportunities and cultural opportunities. Hence, they tend to flock to university towns in the interior of the country or big coastal cities. The depopulation of the Midwest and the nation's interior has left those who remain unnerved, angry, and open to the hyperbole of populists.
Conversely, glacial change among specific populations in our cities has left them bereft of any economic and cultural opportunities. Black or brown communities with social and economic stagnation leave those populations open to the hyperbole of populists.
Whether it's rapid or gradual change, progressive or right-leaning, populists take advantage of both.
Oligarchs/autocrats like to have incompetent underlings who won't present a threat to their power, which means the economy and government are more poorly managed. They also don't care if the overall economic pie gets smaller as long as THEIR piece gets bigger. Incompetence only starts to matter when it affects the ability of the country to compete against other countries, at which point they have to loosen control and promote people who can actually do things well.
Size matters. America is a big country,as is France, China or Russia. Also lots of rural places with a population that is conservative and religious but not connected to the latest ideas and advances like technology. When you look at a map of America with counties labeled just by party, red and blue, big cities easily stand out. The internet and especially Social Media enabled these rural places to connect with other places and I believe what they found is not an alternative world and those different ideas but like minded people. With the help of the algorithms in Social Media feeding you what you already think and like. This also makes it easier for "bad actors" to connect and energize voters in these rural pockets. This is an uprising of a population that until a decade ago had a voice on a local level but rarely on a national level.
One small quibble: Xi did not crack down on Hong Kong because there was unrest there. Xi introduced massive changes to the Hong Kong system and the people reacted with unrest.
With respect Kathleen, isn't that a distinction without much difference?
It's a gigantic difference. You don't step on my foot because I'm feeling pain. I'm feeling pain because you stepped on my foot.
I see your point, but I guess I'm remembering Hong Kong's political arrangements and the prosperity it underpinned as being implicitly perceived by the CCP as "unrest", inasmuch as it was a challenge to Xi's authority.
You seem truly depressed. Perhaps an alternative point-of-view.... we are in the golden age of mankind.... in general, people are wealthier, more powerful, and healthier than at any time in history. On Trump and Trumpism, it seems to be a reaction to long neglected problems and current orthodoxies/priesthoods
1) MAHA: was the previous system, especially in the US, promotive to health. Poking a bit in this direction seems to make sense. I don't mind the debate on this important topic. We are headed towards a world of health ownership by the individual (vs doctors).
2) Shared Defense: A bit more shared investment in defense seems like a good thing. I can certainly understand the irritation to the European rhetoric of 6-week vacations/full healthcare.
3) Shift of focus from Europe to Americas: Obviously, what happens in your neighborhood impact you way more than some far off place. Mexico is far more important to the US than anyone in Europe.
4) Education/Research: again... was the current system really working... poking a bit at reforming it makes a lot of sense. Education/Research has been a huge success and that success has bred arrogance and a lack of willingness to adapt.
5) revenue mix: Shifting the federal revenue mix from primarily income tax to some level of sales tax (tariffs), fees (everywhere), and using the US government balance sheet ... it is an interesting experiment.
Overall, I think the problems being "poked" are the right ones. Are the solutions proposed the right ones, I have my doubts, but a little experimentation is not a bad thing. The political opposition would be wise to directly address these topics as well. On governance, we do need to close the loophole of "taxation without representation" with the tariffs. Trump seems to have found a loophole which he is exploiting... I guess from years of practice in real estate.
Finally, on Russia, I just wonder if the Ukraine war is actually a process of "de-fanging" a very negative influence in the world. On China, they are navigating a massive number of problems (demographics, debt crisis, massive increase in defense spending, etc). Even their successes (EV as an example) have deep issues with profitability. Buffett just disinvested from BYD. Over the last 50 years, the world has built a dependency on low-cost, low-margin, dirty industries from China. As they try to leverage that "strength," alternatives will be built. It might get a little rough in the transition, but nothing prevents the movement elsewhere.
Overall, there is a lot of churn, but the world is not a bad place.
Disagree with the common defense of Trump. It’s not enough to pick the right problems, that’s the easy part! Your solutions have to be good too. Any policy by anyone can be justified with a “but the status quo wasn’t great either”, but there’s lots of disastrous policies.
We “poked” the Middle East quite a bit with the whole Iraq thing, for example. Mao and Stalin poked some very real problems in their countries.
fair enough. I am not a Trump supporter..I could do without all the drama. It would be nice if the democrats addressed the right problems. The party seems lost. looking for a real debate on these important issues with reasonable alternatives.
Many Americans like yourself also don't quite know what the Democrats are about. Which is mainly because they lack the 24/7 influence machine benefiting the GOP in the form of FOX News, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair, and RW talk radio.
A "reasonable debate" over the future of healthcare makes sense, yes? The current federal shutdown, for example, is because the Democrats want to prevent health insurance premiums rising by 100-200% over the next calendar year. If you take away insurance from the bottom 10-20% of Americans, who do you think will reimburse hospitals when they show up for care and are unable to pay?
Well... I don't listen to any of the GOP or Conventional news sources...
On healthcare, you are referring to ACA subsidies... fair enough.. I am ok with this subsidy... in the short term. However, this is not a serious conversation on healthcare because it is only about insurance. Today, the healthcare system is this massive beast with little transparency with costs going out of control. A real debate would be: 1) what causes bad health ? 2) how do we reach an accommodation between the individual/society on encouraging good health ? 3) if you insist on doing things which cause bad health, do I have to pay for it ? 4) how do we reform compensation to be more transparent 5) etc...
A serious debate would go after the core underlying issues and suggest ways of addressing them.
Rahul agree with most of your post, especially with the Democrats, I am one, addressing issues. The PBS show Uncommon Knowledge, recently had a show with three historians, including Stephen Kotkin and Niall Ferguson. Excellent show and Niall echoed many of points. It was a fascinating show if you are interested.
Actually that show devolved into an unruly shouting match among three ego-centric historians, each absolutely sure of the rightness of his own position and interpretation. It said more about them than about whatever reality actually exists.
Thanks... not surprisingly, I love this show !
" in general, people are wealthier, more powerful, and healthier than at any time in history”
One has to ask how well that quotation would play out in Russia, Ukraine, many areas in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America, China, the Middle East, and a number of other places around the world including Appalachia and a number of other both rural and inner-city areas in the United States.
What is actually the case is that there are certainly substantial pockets of those who are wealthier. more powerful, and healthier, but the discrepancies between those that are and those that are not are rather a testament to a world which does indeed have the resources to make your description a reality, but in which those discrepancies are growing. One proof of that is the enormous number of refugees seeking asylum all across Europe and in the Americas, numbers that are destabilizing a number of those countries to which so many are fleeing.
Further, we are closer to nuclear war than we’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. World-wide saber-rattling is increasing rather than decreasing.
We have just recovered from a world-wide pandemic that, in addition to the millions it killed, also severely disrupted the world-wide supply chains in this increasingly interconnected world. Yet even here in the county you claim to so well served by Education/Research, the US, a leader in both, both are being decimated by the authoritarian polices of anti-intellectualism, revenge, and health cranks who seem to want to take us back to the last century.
You say that “A little experimentation is not a bad thing", and I would agree if the experimentation was not devolving into an all out war on the democratic process across the world.
Do we have problems all across the world? Of course we do. We always have had. But the solution is not to disdain, threaten, and overturn the alliances that combined to defeat the greatest evil in human history less than a century ago. It is not to disdain, disavow, and in some cases reverse the educational, technical, medical, and social progress made, however falteringly following the two greatest man-made catastrophes in human history (1914-18 and 1937-45). It is not to turn the world into warring camps armed with the potential to ‘solve' all our problems by entirely doing away with us or returning us to a radioactive Stone Age.
Ever since ‘the kingship descended from Heaven’ in ancient Sumer. strongmen (an a few women) leaders have been turning their powers to self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of wealth and power, suppression of political opposition, and territorial expansion through various means of economic, social, and military aggression. It is one of the oldest stories in what we call ‘civilization’.
The United States was created as an alternative to four millennia of top down rule, some of it relatively benign, some unimaginably cruel, most somewhere in between, but but all based on some variation of either ‘the divine right of kings’ or ‘our political, financial, and/or military success entitles us to make all the decisions for everybody else’.
Our alternative (Novus Ordo Seclorum) has been stumbling along for nearly 250 years, and across the world that alternative has been a beacon to many who have attempted, with varying degrees of success to emulate it, and it remains, as one of the best of us once noted, “the last best hope of earth”.
We are just under three weeks away from the anniversary of Lincoln’s extraordinary reiteration of that alternative on a cold November day at the site of the greatest battle ever fought on the American continent - coincidentally (or perhaps not) just days after the public debut of Ken Burn’s documentary on the American Revolution.
The fact that the 250th anniversary of our alternative will be overseen by a President who has no concept of what we were founded to become, nor any concern to maintain this, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted, is perhaps, one of the greatest ironies in our history.
I am curious about this part of the post: "a lot of leaders are looking eerily like Putin — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel being classic examples." How does Netanyahu resemble Putin? Israel has historically been surrounded by and attacked by real enemies bent on its elimination. Putin has trumped up imaginary threats in order to start multiple wars of expansion and conquest. Israel citizens have rights and freedoms, and can vote, (even their sizeable Arab population). Russia is highly repressive and Putin murders his political enemies.
It's true that Arab Israelis can vote. But that alone doesn't get you very far. Northern Irish Catholics had always been able to vote. But until the power sharing executive was introduced they were second class citizens in virtually every other respect - employment, housing, civil rights - just like Arab Israelis are. This is the fate of minority ethnic-religious communities within countries beleaguered by neighbouring states of the same ethnic-religious group.
Also think Netanyahu is, if anything, more popular with the general population now than in 2023.
The idea that the 17th century mirrored the 20th century in many ways is not new. In 2011 the historian Geoffrey Parker published “Global Crisis,” a book which makes that claim. History doesn’t repeat itself, so it’s not possible to know whether the current trend toward authoritarianism will be succeeded by an Age of Enlightenment, as the 18th century turned out to be. But, at least the fact that a historical parallel to our present predicament ushered in its wake a positive outcome should be a cause for hope.
Is this the opening crawl of the film you are proposing?
Tech, the global revolutionary force, has freed information, threatened the elites, and disrupted the social order. Autocrats arise, and with all the apparatus of the state at their disposal, use repressive force to bring back order. A small band of tech geniuses..yada yada yada.
Somehow casting tech as the hero just isn't working for me anymore, Noah.
Just a thought - AI seems far more even tempered than social media, might that be a moderating force?
That's not an immutable characteristic of AI—it's simply a matter of the material that the AI is trained on and the parameters that are set for it. When Musk Wanted to remove the leftist slant of Grok he ended up with something that was instantaneously pro-Nazi. Trump is now trying to influence the slant of mainstream media and maybe he'll go after AI as well.
I would argue it is an immutable characteristic of AI as a viable commercial product. It's so expensive to run it needs a huge consumer and business customer base.
You can keep something acceptable as a commercial product by simply keeping it bland and vanilla. One AI product that I have used refused to answer any question in 2024 that was “election related" according to that product's categorization. I seldom use this product.
I still think you overestimate the love people in the West actually hold for democracy. When push comes to shove voters have shown a deep indifference towards institutions and the country we've built. I don't think most voters understand it. I am not a huge Thaddeus Stevens fan, but I have a lot of empathy for that scene in Lincoln where he and the President are arguing and he looks at the President and says "you know what the people are" because he's right: the people are not as enlightened as we'd like to believe.
Amusingly the same actor offers another wonderful insight in a separate movie (Men in Black of all movies): "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Yep, Tommy Lee Jones was not my pick for calling our current calamity (and in many ways this doesn't 'call' it) but I find myself thinking of both lines.
I think there's actually something to do this.
AI by definition is the probabilistic middle ground. When we had far fewer media outlets, those few outlets had to target a broad range of opinions and diluted extreme opinions. It's quite possible that AI, as a media aggregator and reporter, can play that same part
Of course, there's a lot of caveats there - especially around accuracy and hallucinations. Also, the average of mass misinformation on the internet (which could also be generated from AI) would end up being just as bad. And it would be very easy to train a model on propaganda.
...but if there ever was a way out of rage-bait social media, responsible AI is probably it.
Noah;
Suppose you have ever done one of those two-day retreats on decision making and taken part in the Life Raft scenario or crashed plane with survivors in the Canadian wilderness. In those cases, you come to understand that collective decision-making is better than singular decision-making.
I’m thinking that the lower GDP is a function of singular decision-making, which turns out to be less productive. As long as mercurial humans exist, we’ll have cults of power; as long as certain leaders have people willing to kill opponents, we’ll have dictators with crappy economies.
I do have a take on how populists arise and get elected. It is not social media, that is just an effective tool. Change is what is causing the dislocation that acts as a siren song for populists.
Change that never happens or change that happens too rapidly causes humans' dislocation. Rapid economic change has rendered vast swaths of the Midwest deserts for economic opportunity. Young people would not move to Silina, KS, or North Platte, NE, for job opportunities.
The young want both economic opportunities and cultural opportunities. Hence, they tend to flock to university towns in the interior of the country or big coastal cities. The depopulation of the Midwest and the nation's interior has left those who remain unnerved, angry, and open to the hyperbole of populists.
Conversely, glacial change among specific populations in our cities has left them bereft of any economic and cultural opportunities. Black or brown communities with social and economic stagnation leave those populations open to the hyperbole of populists.
Whether it's rapid or gradual change, progressive or right-leaning, populists take advantage of both.
At least that is my two cents.
Oligarchs/autocrats like to have incompetent underlings who won't present a threat to their power, which means the economy and government are more poorly managed. They also don't care if the overall economic pie gets smaller as long as THEIR piece gets bigger. Incompetence only starts to matter when it affects the ability of the country to compete against other countries, at which point they have to loosen control and promote people who can actually do things well.
Size matters. America is a big country,as is France, China or Russia. Also lots of rural places with a population that is conservative and religious but not connected to the latest ideas and advances like technology. When you look at a map of America with counties labeled just by party, red and blue, big cities easily stand out. The internet and especially Social Media enabled these rural places to connect with other places and I believe what they found is not an alternative world and those different ideas but like minded people. With the help of the algorithms in Social Media feeding you what you already think and like. This also makes it easier for "bad actors" to connect and energize voters in these rural pockets. This is an uprising of a population that until a decade ago had a voice on a local level but rarely on a national level.
The English experienced authoritarian rule twice under the Stuarts, took more than 80 years to shake them off.